Word: dreiser
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...courage and faith in human nature, according to Brooks, but American authors during the last twenty years have tended to take the opposite viewpoint. Possibly throught Spengler's influence, certainly through the cynicism and disillusionment caused by the World War, modern writers like Hemingway, Eliot, O'Neill, and Dreiser are primarily concerned with pointing out that "life is a dark little pocket." Brooks appeals for more of the Homeric mood, for writers like Robert Frost and Lewis Mumford, genuine idealists who have an appreciation of human nature and the heroic aspects of life...
...almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase. She makes its tortures seem at least as valid as the dull suburban tragedies from Farrell's or Dreiser's Midwest, commonly called lifelike. Reflections in a Golden Eye is the Southern school at its most Gothic, but also at its best. It is as though William Faulkner saw to the bottom of matters which merely excite him, shed his stylistic faults, and wrote it all out with Tolstoyan...
Many books end up in Hollywood. Last week, for a change, two books came out of Hollywood. Both carry identical counsel for the U. S. citizen on identical subjects: Defense, Democracy and World War II. America Is Worth Saving is a spiteful, wretchedly written tract by great, aging Theodore Dreiser (The Titan, An American Tragedy), who lives in Hollywood, lectures to California's women's clubs. The Remarkable Andrew might well be Dreiser's tract scripted into a novel by its author, Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo...
...plot is about the return of the ghost of General Andrew Jackson to help an admirer. Trumbo's General Jackson agrees with Theodore Dreiser right down the line: 1) Europe's wars are no concern whatever of the U. S.; 2) the U. S. has little interest in the British Fleet; 3) Great Britain is not a democracy; 4) if Hitler can't even cross the English Channel, he can't cross the Atlantic; 5) U. S. concern with fifth columnists is hysteria; 6) Ger many is not "an international outlaw"; 7) the U. S. didn...
...Dreiser's tract is largely an attack on this felonious isle, this seat of tyrants, this England. He is also so fearfully wrought up over the present state of the U. S. that America is Worth Saving reads like the definitive burlesque of Upton Sinclair. Like Trumbo, Dreiser is just a good guy trying to revive the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Last fall, during the Presidential campaign, he announced his support of Earl Browder and the Communist Party platform...