| Chapter : | Introduction |
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association with the Communist Party during the '30s and '40s caused his work to be labeled as anti-American. During this period of nationalistic fury, Dreiser's work could not be made to fit into the paradigm prescribed by nationalist patterns. Because his fiction did not seem to represent accepted American ideals and values, it was seen as inferior, unworthy of any real literary inquiry or interest. H. L. Mencken wrote that what offended the critics of this later generation most was “not actually Dreiser's shortcomings as an artist, but Dreiser's shortcomings as a Christian and an American” (“Bugaboo” 87). Probably the most damaging criticism of Dreiser's work during this period, however, was Lionel Trilling's influential essay “Reality in America,” first published in The Partisan Review in 1940 and later republished in his book The Liberal Imagination (1950). Trilling accuses Dreiser of being “awkward and dull,” and states that unlike Thoreau and Emerson, whose works are “specifically American,” Dreiser “lacks [a] sense of colloquial diction” (16). He wonders “how [Dreiser's] moral preoccupations are going to be useful in confronting the disasters that threaten us” (12), and criticizes him for “thinking” amorally:
Compounding the problem that Dreiser's work did not fit nationalistic critical attitudes, the emphasis on scientific or philological methodology promoted during the 1940s and '50s as a way of legitimizing the study of American literature in the universities also made it difficult for Dreiser's work, with its stark realism and prosaic verbosity, to be accepted as worthy of serious study (Pizer, Dowell, and Rusch 92). As a result, Dreiser's novels were not only attacked for their inappropriate political and social views, but also for their complete disregard of “form and structure” (92). In 1951 Saul Bellow wrote that “Dreiser is not very