Word: dreiser
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...Defense of Dreiser...
...Book of Daniel, transparently based on the Rosenberg case, is a bold novel that, all things considered, is surprisingly successful. Doctorow's biggest gamble was sinking his energies into the Rosenberg case in the first place. Not that successful fiction cannot spring from old newspapers, as Dostoevsky and Dreiser both demonstrated. But the Rosenberg trial was a kind of drawn-out, draining and rather grisly national ordeal...
...with well-meaning arguments for doing away with it all, it is easy to forget the crimes against political freedom, science and the arts that have been committed in the name of morality. Books by Aristophanes, Defoe, Rousseau and Voltaire have been seized by U.S. customs, and Hemingway, Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis were once banned in Boston. Such past errors certainly do not constitute a conclusive argument against censorship, but they do underline one fact: no apparatus of censorship has ever been devised, or probably can be devised, subtle enough to assure the freedom of the arts or of ideas...
...nostalgia for their honeymoon, joyfully rows him out from shore. But once on the lake, Antonio begins rocking the boat spasmodically, pathetically slapping at his wife with an oar, muttering all the while, "An American tragedy, An American tragedy." There is more here than a comic allusion to Dreiser's novel. Saura has finally defined the object of his attacks, for The Garden of Delights is indeed an American tragedy, the tragedy of a stagnating political consciousness confronted with grotesque images of its past...
...have to look far. After World War I, when prosperity and a growing advertising industry boosted the car into the national consciousness, the automobile began to play an important part in our literature. Clyde Griffiths, the American Dream hero of Dreiser's American Tragedy, sets out on his destructive way after an afternoon joyride ends in a bloody smash-up. Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby resolves itself after a car crash...