American Tragedy

The Stature of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Survey of the Man and His Work, edited by Alfred Kazin and Charles Shapiro. 303 pp. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. $5.00

The thirty-four reviews, memoirs and critical essays in this volume provide a conspectus of opinion concerning the novelist who, although ill educated, intellectually undisciplined, and without taste, dominated with his brutal vigor the strange literary world of the 1920’s. Although even the major works of that febrile and strident age have already lapsed into desuetude, it is refreshing to turn back to them occasionally, for their authors, however deficient, were at least individualists who thought for themselves, so that they seem giants when compared to their epigoni, the bloodless little men of the present who timorously walk the Liberal Line with a passion for nothing except absolute conformity. R. P. O.

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The Stature of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Survey of the Man and His Work, edited by Alfred Kazin and Charles Shapiro. 303 pp. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. $5.00

The thirty-four reviews, memoirs and critical essays in this volume provide a conspectus of opinion concerning the novelist who, although ill educated, intellectually undisciplined, and without taste, dominated with his brutal vigor the strange literary world of the 1920’s. Although even the major works of that febrile and strident age have already lapsed into desuetude, it is refreshing to turn back to them occasionally, for their authors, however deficient, were at least individualists who thought for themselves, so that they seem giants when compared to their epigoni, the bloodless little men of the present who timorously walk the Liberal Line with a passion for nothing except absolute conformity. R. P. O.