Word: dreiser
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Carl Sandberg and Theodore Dreiser for all their seeming rude virility, are as much sloppy sentimentalists as any poets we have," Mr. Robert S. Hillyer 17, said in an interview for the CRIMSON yesterday. Mr. Hillyer, who is a member of the English Department, is also a poet of some note himself...
...while Dreiser's sincere plodding and plodding sincerity irks us about as much as over-sophisticated brevity, we do not find it necessary to retire to the bush and there pounding a big tribal drum, gather cohorts to slay the Emperor Jones of American literature. We are not fanatical about Dreiser. As far as we are concerned, he can make his way through any jungle of Lethiopian illiteracy without wasting his silver bullet. All we care to do is to leap out on him at an unguarded moment and make him fire off one of his lead slugs in vain...
...This is the plot of Theodore Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy' in two volumes, a work occasionally poignant, occasionally intense in its realism, often deadly dull, usually a monotonous narative of everything that happened in the course of Clyde Griffiths' short, worthless, and almost meaningless life...
...which let us chant an antiphonal amen. And continue. For continue we must, now that Dreiser has given us the big rhythm. But perhaps we are hitting our man too many times on the same blood-clot. Nevertheless we remember that there have been in years a gone double-decker novels whose power increased with their size. Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil" was such a one; it captured a dinky little Nobel Prize or something of the sort. Then there was Fielding's "Tom Jones"--pretty good for an old-timer, what...
...here let us leave Mr. Dreiser. He has not written a great book nor a significantly vile book. He has tumbled from the pedestal upon which his cultists have placed him with such genuflections and censoring of incense. He has written a great stupid opus. He has disastrously damaged what real claims to distinction he may once have had. And while we are not among those iconoclastic dervishes who are dancing with delight over his downfall, we passionately convinced that his future will not be as rosy as his present is and his past has been...