| Chapter : | Introduction |
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popular now, unfortunately...” (147). In 1954 John Berryman added that although Dreiser had been one of the pivotal figures in American literature “his immense frame [has] so deteriorated, especially after his death in 1945, that when a detailed biography was produced by Robert Elias in 1949, an influential book reporter could question whether Dreiser was a subject of general interest to the public at all” (149). The cold critical reception Dreiser received during these two generations did not subside until the mid 1960s, when Dreiser's fiction finally could be seen with more clarity as literary works: “No longer was it necessary to defend or attack [Dreiser's] subjects or ideas because of their challenge to contemporary convention” (Pizer, Dowel, and Rusch 93).
The result was an explosion of interest in Dreiser's work. These studies are varied in their scope and application, but the majority are still concerned with the way his work deals with the question of naturalism in American life. Miriam Gogol states that “much of the significant writing about him since the mid 1960s has focused on the issue of whether he is a naturalist, which suggests that this controversy has become one of the permanent centers of Dreiserian criticism” (“Intro” ix). 1 These essays differ from their predecessors, though, in that they use Dreiser's fiction as a way to better understand how the definition of naturalism has shifted over the years. Pizer, Dowell, and Rusch explain:
Also during the past three decades, Dreiser scholars have begun the process of reexamining claims that his prose is heavy-handed and awkward, that “his style [is] atrocious, his sentences are chaotic, his grammar and syntax faulty” (Whipple 96). Recently, scholars have actually found the opposite to be true. They argue that Dreiser's prose is, in fact, a delicate