Word: dreisers
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...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...
...they didn't do that. Hell no! They let Mr. Dreiser, (Ted Dreiser, as some of his cronies playfully call him), spill a bib-full. And what a bib-full! His hero spent pages and pages in a brothel. Yes, boys, he tells you everything about a brothel. And what he doesn't tell you won't matter. But that's nothing! He can write just as much about other things. Sure he can. You forget Ted was a rewrite man for a New York paper. After the hero lets drown his pregnant sweetheart, not wife, whom he wanted...
...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...