Word: dreiser
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...BEST SHORT STORIES OF THEODORE DREISER (349 pp.)-World...
...Theodore Dreiser wrote like a man with a toothache, and his work has all the painful sincerity of a groan. Few American writers of the first rank are in such a condition of neglect by literary fashion, and no other American writer of the first rank is known to have joined the Communist Party. These facts are related, though not directly...
Toward the end of his life (he died in 1945), Dreiser often seemed far gone in alcohol, and he spoke about Russia with an undergraduate's defensive truculence. "Oh, you can't beat that system . . . a whole country belonging to the people," he told an interviewer in 1941. Power and pity were his themes, and things called corporations-which in his view brutalized those who controlled them and crushed those who did not-were his enemies. All his life, says Novelist James Farrell in an introduction to these stories,* Dreiser was on a quest for "a theory...
...star on the Baltimore Sunpapers. He was the forward lance in the march of American letters from John Fox Jr. (The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come) to Sinclair Lewis, helped kill off much of the trash in American writing. Many of the best U.S. writers of the century (Lewis, Dreiser, Cather, Pound. Fitzgerald) were discovered or trundled by Mencken in his happy days as co-editor (with George Jean Nathan) of the Smart Set (1914-23) and the old American Mercury (1924-33). He took out after U.S. criticism, which he said "smells of the pulpit, the chautauqua, the schoolroom...
...Paris Review, rough, tough Chicago Novelist Nelson (The Man with the Golden Arm) Algren, 46, gratuitously slipped a needle into the unprotected backside of rough, tough Chicago Novelist James T. (Studs Lonigan) Farrell. Said Algren: "Farrell . . . isn't even a real good stenographer ... He compares himself with Theodore Dreiser, but I don't think he's in Dreiser's league. He's as bad a writer as Dreiser, but he doesn't have the compassion that makes Dreiser's bad writing important." In Manhattan, Author Farrell, 51, compassionately turned the other cheek: "Algren...