Word: dreiser
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...parents, and a good many grandparents. Inside, shelves flaunt 6,000 paperback volumes of fact, fiction and fancy, skinny picture books for preschoolers, fat classics for the solemn. The "Hardy Boys." The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. A Child's Garden of Verses. Mark Twain. Sinclair Lewis. Bernard Malamud. Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. But which one to pick...
...literary reputation. He describes himself "in the front rank of second-class writers"; in this novel only, perhaps, did he rise above that description. Morgan makes no attempt to judge Maugham's literary importance, preferring instead to defer to other writers like H.G. Wells, Henry James, and Theodore Dreiser, who said Maugham was "a great artist" and Of Human Bondage a work of genius. Morgan also cites critics like Malcolm Cowley, who thought Of Human Bondage Maugham's greatest work, and asked, "Why did he never climb back to the same level...
...Chicago, Farrell chose to escape spiritual poverty by writing about it. At 28, he published Young Lonigan, the first of three novels tracing his anti-hero Studs from boyhood through boozy dissipation to early death. Though Farrell's unvarnished naturalism won him raves as "the new Theodore Dreiser," his unblinking approach to sex and scurrility provoked critics throughout his career. After the Lonigan cycle, he published 50 books, but none of them won the praise and popularity of his first...
...this slender tale, which pointedly recalls Theodore Dreiser's novels of the period, Malick constructs a complex web of moral ambiguities. He invites us to sympathize with the criminal Bill and Abby, who have a right to revolt against poverty. But he also arouses our affection for the privileged farmer, a kind and sickly man whose riches pay off only in loneliness and boredom. To Malick, all these people are victims of their innocent faith in a warped American dream. Their tragedy is that they blame themselves, rather than their false ideals, for the misery of their lives. Though...
...Anne is the fixture as before. Its five tales are confined to the standard Farrell inventory: lives with insufficient love, the sorrows of gin, childhood wounds carried for a lifetime. Yet the stories cannot be easily dismissed or forgotten. Farrell's approach, like that of his mentor Theodore Dreiser, consists not only of primitive human drama but also of profound human sympathy. In this, his 51st book, the drama is crude but the sympathy incalculable...