Word: dreiser
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...Commission and other agencies of the Common-wealth have concentrated their efforts, time, and public funds on books like Fanny Hill and Tropic of Cancer. For example, it was only recently that the Boston Public Library was permitted to place even such a book as Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy on its shelves. As the New York Supreme Court said in that state's Fanny Hill case, a book ought not to be banned as long as it has "literary and historic merit." The Massachusetts Supreme Court, finally settling the Tropic of Cancer case, said that "anything with literary...
...German Garden, finding Sinclair Lewis "turning rancid'' in Elmer Gantry, moving on to the discovery of the "terrific" Ernest Hemingway (who does, however, earn a boy's stern moral disapproval as "one of the crowd of degenerate Americans who settled . . . in Paris after the war"). Dreiser's English is "bum," and John Dos Passos rouses a boy's puritanism with the "unalleviatedly filthy" Manhattan Transfer...
...lumbering ineptness whenever it interfered in strictly cultural and artistic matters. This ineptness that Aaron writes of, this inability to deal with American writers on American terms is something that the myths of both the Right and the Left have forgotten. Even someone as useful to the Party as Dreiser was continually embarrassing its leaders; he was, at heart, an individualist, and his allegiance was always conditional. Dreiser talked of "equity" and "service," and "opportunity," and his social protests always were closer to the moralistic Progressives than to agitprop...
Writers like Dreiser and Dos Passos stayed close to the Party because it seemed that the Communists were one of the few outlets for serious social protest in the country. Since the First World War, political and cultural radicalism had followed separate paths in the United States; in more sentimental pre-war days, you could meet radicals from Max Eastman's Masses and Wobblies like Big Bill Haywood at Greenwich Village tango teas--and if there was something frivolous and arty about such political reformers, there was also a close identification on their part with cultural reform. Literature...
...decade later in the Depression, art-for-art's-sake writers like Malcolm Cowley became interested in politics, but the Communists had in the meantime preempted the positions of radical social protest. As the instances of Dreiser and Dos Passos show, they were not able to make any cultural use of their pre-eminence. The American intelligentsia turned left in the grim years between '28 and '32, but the Party was never able to adapt itself to it. It was not simply that Marxism produced no literary criticism worth printing, though that was true enough; but even the social criticism...