Word: dreiser
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Some of the most exciting novels about American industry have been written by those who liked it least. In the pages of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser or Upton Sinclair, industry is a jungle inferno of grab and stab. But behind the social bias is the magnetic pull of wheat, or rail roads, or oil, and what it means to work with and around the sources of American industrial power. Author Victor White has put some of this magnetism without the bias into Peter Domanig in America. Where he falls short of the earlier models is in making his hero...
...American literature--the sense of nature and of revelation of Emerson and Thoreau, the sharp and pessimistic but compassionate wit of Twain, Lardner, and Marquis, the enthusiasm of Whitman, the highly developed awareness of fantasy and symbolism of Melville, James, and Faulkner, the sense of social forces of Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Steinbeck, and the linguistic facility of Thurber and Perelman. Add to this the satiric ability of George Orwell...
...soul. More likely; it was he who had never quite found his. Yet there was a deep-down probity in the man and his work. He never cheated with his evidence, and his evidence came from the secret places of the heart. Though he manhandled the English language, recalling Dreiser's powerful clumsiness, he never consciously wrote a shoddy line. On the 20th century stage, so far, only Shaw and Sean O'Casey outrank him. He failed in his ultimate goal, to go beyond the tree line of tragedy and reach the highest, noblest peaks. But few others...
...qualifications beyond a smattering of psychoanalytic vocabulary, an ability to generalize from the small to the big (e.g., the luxuriousness of American spittoons proves the wastefulness of the U.S. economy) and a limited awareness of U.S. social customs which need be no more recent than the novels of Theodore Dreiser. A typewriter and a subscription to Britain's anti-American New Statesman and Nation help...
...Since Dreiser and Frank Norris, the businessman in U.S. fiction has seldom been a hero; if he has not been a heel, he has at least been a target for satire. In Marquand's Point of No Return, the satire was gentle, in The Hucksters sharp. In many other "realistic" novels, the businessman was actually a caricature. On sale last week was a book that broke the tired old pattern. In Executive Suite (Houghton Mifflin: $3), Cameron Hawley has depicted businessmen who are neither heroes nor heels nor geniuses but, in the words of one of the characters...