Word: lets
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...let us not take either the Anderson-Mencken school or their antagonists too seriously. As Voltaire once phrased it, "let us 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...
...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...
...lest some goggle-eyed callow youth still think that the reading of this travesty of a tragedy is all play and no work let him take into consideration the acute banality of the story. THE SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE epitomizes the novel as follows...
...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...