Word: dreisers
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...meantime, Dreiser's publishers blare forth with sensational advertisements; America's foremost living novelist, as they declare him to be, has written "with the artist's loftiest vision" a tremendous book. Somewhere in all this welter, it seems to me, must be a kernel of truth. Perhaps it is in the significant fact that "An American Tragedy" is being far from phenomenally sought by the book-buying public...
...keep to the middle of the garden path"; but not too strictly, for it is rather pleasant to walk on the controversial borders. And while we are about it, let us ape Mr. Sherwood Anderson's jerky unpremeditated style with about the same degree of accuracy that Dreiser displays in his grammar...
...American Tragedy"--what a book what a needlessly long tour-de-force. And we don't mean maybe! Mr. Dreiser, laborious hind of realism, was disgusted by the sickly romantic breed of best sellers. "Mein Gott!" he belched. (This was way back before Prohibition.) "I shall write a book--oh, such a book." He has. It gripes the romanticists, it wearies the amoral. Mr. Dreiser has forgotten nothing; he has taken a "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable" hero (the big gun, Willie Shakspere spouted all those adjectives) and put him through hours and hours of representative paces...
...want to know how many thousand words it took--but, well, never mind. Guess a hundred, double it, multiply that by two, add an odd fifty for good measure and you'll be pretty near it. Oh yes, Dreiser wrote almost half a million. If anybody else and done it--but, of course, nobody would have--but if anybody else had, the publishers would have said, yawning. "Well, cut that in half, throw away half of that, re-write the remainder four times, looking sharply for split infinitives and dangling participles, and then perhaps, perhaps we shall take a chance...
...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...