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Updated: June 8, 2025
Dreiser practises differs in some respects from that of any other American novelist, no matter how truthful, must be referred to one special quality of his own temperament.
Theodore Dreiser says, in Sister Carrie a book with so much bitter truth in it that it was suppressed by the original publishers: Once the bright days of summer pass by, a city takes on the sombre garb of grey, wrapped in which it goes about its labors during the long winter.
They were young American sociologists, young English realists, Russian horrorists; Anatole France, Rolland, Nexo, Wells, Shaw, Key, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken, and all the other subversive philosophers and artists whom women were consulting everywhere, in batik-curtained studios in New York, in Kansas farmhouses, San Francisco drawing-rooms, Alabama schools for negroes.
Dreiser displays, almost alone among American novelists, the characteristics of what for lack of a better native term we have to call the peasant type the type to which Gorki belongs and which Tolstoy wanted to belong to. Enlarged by genius though Mr.
Dreiser writes, it is true, as an outsider; he simplifies the account of Cowperwood's adventures after wealth, touching the record here and there with the naïve hand of a peasant even though a peasant of genius wondering how great riches are actually obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at the mystery.
"Dreiser," he would say in Philadelphia and Newark, if not before, "it's in just such a neighborhood as this that some day I'm going to live.
George Ade, being a satirist of genius, has stood out of all this; Theodore Dreiser, Indianian by birth but hopelessly a rebel, has stood out against it; but Booth Tarkington, trying to be Hoosier of Hoosiers, has given himself up to the romantic and sentimental elements of the Indiana literary tradition.
For this his favorite situation is in large part responsible: that of a strong man, no longer generously young, loving downward to some plastic, ignorant girl dazzled by his splendor and immediately compliant to his advances. Mr. Dreiser is obsessed by the spectacle of middle age renewing itself at the fires of youth an obsession which has its sentimental no less than its realistic traits.
Dreiser from falling into errors which detract somewhat from the greatness of his novels, and as a whole I command this volume to the discriminating reader. Those who read Mr. Dwight's earlier volume entitled "Stamboul Nights" will recall the very real genius for the romantic presentation of adventure in exotic backgrounds which the author revealed.
The titles, such as "Great Violinists," "Harmony in Thirteen Lessons," and "How to Sing," did not intrigue me, but in idly turning the pages of this "Popular American Composers" I came across a half-tone reproduction of a photograph of Paul Dresser, the only less celebrated brother of Theodore Dreiser, with a short biography of the composer of On the Banks of the Wabash.
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