Word: dreiser
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Unless Theodore Dreiser's editors have fooled us again, "The Stoic" will take its place in American literature courses as his last novel. The course reading list will be the proper place for it, since--like Dreiser's other posthumous novel "The Bulwark"-- "The Stoic's" chief importance is historical rather than literary. The jacket blurb to the contrary, "The Stoic" simply does not reach the stature of "The Financier" or "The Titan," its predecessors in "The Trilogy of Desire." In concluding what Parrington called "a colossal study of the American businessman," Dreiser tells those familiar with the earlier volumes...
...this does not deny "The Stoic" its merits. As a story it is often good Dreiser, which is very good fiction indeed. Marked by the vitality and massive documentation typical of Dreiser, this extension of Cowperwood's activities into the London financial world at times hits with undeniable power. Although Dreiser never completed "The Stoic" he did live long enough to polish it far beyond the raggedness of "The Bulwark." This superiority inheres in the book's construction. Cowperwood--his business and his philanderings--occupies the stage at all times; hence there is none of the diffusion of energy that...
Despite the concentration on Cowperwood, "The Stoic" paradoxically achieves its major significance only after Dreiser has interred him in his lavish mausoleum. Strictly speaking, the closing section is extraneous both to this novel and to the trilogy as a whole. But as an epitaph to Cowperwood-and in fact to Dreiser himself--the long search into Brahmanism by Cowperwood's last mistress Berenice assumes a weight completely disproportionate to its length. In her study of the Yoga discipline Dreiser furnishes an acute insight into his own final outlook on life...
...mistress travels to India, seeks a religious meaning in life by studying Yoga. But she cannot reconcile spiritual claims with the poverty she sees around her, and is condemned to the old Dreiserian materialist world. In notes for a final chapter, which he did not live to write, Dreiser indicates that the mistress, with the money left her by Cowperwood, realizes his dream of subsidizing a hospital. Seldom has Dreiser allowed himself such a positive affirmation...
...whole generation of socially conscious writers have walked through the door which Dreiser opened with Sister Carrie and The Financier. In The Stoic, Dreiser is at the end of the corridor, looking backwards. A blazer of trails, he was nevertheless a poor guide; his limitations as a thinker were summed up in his autobiography: "Chronically nebulous, doubting, uncertain, I stared at everything, only wondering, not solving...