e: "I admit a vast compulsion
which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes or
impulses." The jokers behind the arras pull the strings. It is pretty,
but what is it all about?... The criticism which deals only with
externals sees "Sister Carrie" as no more than a deft adventure into
realism. Dreiser is praised, when he is praised at all, for making
Carrie so clear, for understanding her so well. But the truth is, of
course, that his achievement consists precisely in making patent the
impenetrable mystery of her, and of the tangled complex of striving and
aspiration of which she is so helplessly a part. It is in this sense
that "Sister Carrie" is a profound work. It is not a book of glib
explanations, of ready formulae; it is, above all else, a book of
wonder....

Of "A Traveler at Forty" I have spoken briefly. It is heavy with the
obvious; the most interesting thing in it is the fact that Dreiser had
never seen St. Peter's or Piccadilly Circus until he was too old for
either reverence or romance. "A Hoosier Holiday" is far more
illuminating, despite its platitudinizing. Slow in tempo, discursive,
reflective, intimate, the book covers a vast territory, and lingers in
pleasant fields. One finds in it an almost complete confession of faith,
artistic, religious, even political. And not infrequently that
confession takes the form of ingenuous confidences--about the fortunes
of the house of Dreiser, the dispersed Dreiser clan, the old neighbours
in Indiana, new friends made along the way. In "A Traveler at Forty"
Dreiser is surely frank enough in his vivisections; he seldom forgets a
vanity or a wart. In "A Hoosier Holiday" he goes even further; he
speculates heavily about all his _dramatis personae_, prodding into the
motives behind their acts, wondering what they would do in this or that
situation, forcing them painfully into laboratory jars. They become, in
the end, not unlike characters in a novel; one misses only the neatness
of a plot. Strangely enough, the one personage of the chronicle who
remains dim throughout is the artist, Franklin Booth, Dreiser's host
and companion on the long motor ride from New York to Indiana, and the
maker of the book's excellent pictures. One gets a brilliant etching of
Booth's father, and scarcely less vivid portraits of Speed, the
chauffeur; of various persons encountered on the way, and of friends and
relatives dredged up out of the abyss of the past. But of Booth one
le