Word: dreiser
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...early days read like a bad Theodore Dreiser novel in their unequal mating of ambition to mediocrity. In high school he rated run of the mill as a student. The caption under his yearbook picture read: "An ounce of wit is worth a pound of sorrow." Witcover reports: "Classmates still scratch their heads over what that might mean...
...detail is brilliantly marshaled, but the Dreiser hero implausibly making good-the stand-in for Middle America-is hardly present. Where is the incredible personification of passion and blandness, the slicked-down, good-posture public figure who is as careful with a trouser crease as he is careless with an innuendo? Where is the collector of Lawrence Welk records, the doter on Allen Drury novels...
Beyond ideology he speaks for a lifestyle. In believing the myth of Middle America, Agnew has become a myth himself, and what he really needs is not a journalist but a novelist-a 1972 Dreiser-to do him justice. · Melvin Maddocks
...Princesse de Clèves through the novels of Flaubert and beyond are almost unknown in the works of our novelists." There are memorable figures, of course: Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, John O'Hara's Grace Caldwell Tate and Gloria Wandrous, Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan, Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Steinbeck's Ma Joad, Margaret Mitchell's Scarlett O'Hara, Nabokov's Lolita, Roth's Sophie Portnoy...
VonGeorge was the kind of American failure that Theodore Dreiser was born to document. His real name, according to FBI files, was Merlyn La Verne St. George, and he once served two years in San Quentin for petty theft. He variously, and unsuccessfully, ran a tobacco shop, sold drug products and worked as assistant manager of a discount store. Despite his failures, though, friends in Brockton, Mass., where he moved in 1970, say that VonGeorge seemed determined to provide for his wife and seven children...