s include a volume of "Plays of the Natural and the
Supernatural" (1916); "Life, Art and America," a pamphlet against
Puritanism in letters (1917); a dozen or more short stories and
novelettes, a few poems, and a three-act drama, "The Hand of the
Potter."

Dreiser was born at Terre Haute, Indiana, on August 27, 1871, and, like
most of us, is of mongrel blood, with the German, perhaps,
predominating. He is a tall man, awkward in movement and nervous in
habit; the boon of beauty has been denied him. The history of his youth
is set forth in full in "A Hoosier Holiday." It is curious to note that
he is a brother to the late Paul Dresser, author of "The Banks of the
Wabash" and other popular songs, and that he himself, helping Paul over
a hard place, wrote the affecting chorus:

Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash,
From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay;
Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming ...

But no doubt you know it.

Sec. 5

The work of Dreiser, considered as craftsmanship pure and simple, is
extremely uneven, and the distance separating his best from his worst is
almost infinite. It is difficult to believe that the novelist who wrote
certain extraordinarily vivid chapters in "Jennie Gerhardt," and "A
Hoosier Holiday," and, above all, in "The Titan," is the same who
achieved the unescapable dulness of parts of "The Financier" and the
general stupidity and stodginess of "The 'Genius.'" Moreover, the tide
of his writing does not rise or fall with any regularity; he neither
improves steadily nor grows worse steadily. Only half an eye is needed
to see the superiority of "Jennie Gerhardt," as a sheer piece of
writing, to "Sister Carrie," but on turning to "The Financier," which
followed "Jennie Gerhardt" by an interval of but one year, one observes
a falling off which, at its greatest, is almost indistinguishable from a
collapse. "Jennie Gerhardt" is suave, persuasive, well-ordered, solid in
structure, instinct with life. "The Financier," for all its merits in
detail, is loose, tedious, vapid, exasperating. But had any critic, in
the autumn of 1912, argued thereby that Dreiser was finished, that he
had shot his bolt, his discomfiture would have come swiftly, for "The
Titan," which followed in 1914, was almost as well done as "The
Financier" had been ill done, and there are parts of it which remain, to
this day, the very best writing that Dreiser has ever achie