Theodore Dreiser, Introduction, “Harlan Miners Speak”

 

Theodore Dreiser, Introduction, ‘Harlan Miners Speak’

 

I am posting here (PDF file above) Dreiser’s introduction to the original Harlan Miners Speak:

 

Theodore Dreiser, Introduction

Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields

Prepared by Members of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners

Theodore Dreiser, Lester Cohen, Anna Rochester, Melvin P. Levy, Arnold Johnson, Charles R. Walker, John Dos Passos, Adelaide Walker, Bruce Crawford, Jessie Wakefield, Boris Israel, Sherwood Anderson

New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932

 

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Copies of the original 1932 edition seem to be very rare. This copy is held by the New York Public Library.

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   November 2019

unassuming disposition?

 

Dreiser setting sail for the USSR, 1927

 

“… Dreiser appeals to the reader though the influence of his own unassuming, undogmatic disposition.”

— Edwin Berry Burgum, “Dreiser and His America,” New Masses, January 29 1946

 

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While it may be unfair of me to take one sentence out of context, as it were, I disagree with the implications of this statement.

As Thomas Kranidas convincingly explained in his master’s thesis on An American Tragedy,* Dreiser could be an insufferable snob.

— Roger W. Smith

  November 2019

 

* Thomas Kranidas, “The Materials of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy,” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1953. This thesis was unknown and ignored until Roger W. Smith discovered it, copied the thesis in its entirety, and posted it with Professor Kranidas’s approval.

Thomas Kranidas, ‘The Materials of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy’