Edwin Seaver, review of An American Tragedy – New Masses, May 1926
Posted here (PDF file above) is the following review of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. It was published in the inaugural issue of New Masses, a Marxist publication:
“Theodore Dreiser and the American Novel,” by Edwin Seaver, New Masses, vol. 1, no 1 (May 1926), pg. 24
The review is cited in the standard Dreiser bibliography by Pizer, Dowell, and Rusch, but it does not seem to have been reprinted. It is not included in Jack Salzman’s Theodore Dreiser: The Critical Reception.
Seaver, who frequently wrote for New Masses, had leftist views. One might say that he approved of An American Tragedy because of its realistic portrayal of American life as opposed to a tendency of novelists who, Seaver felt, wallowed in self-expression.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
December 2019
Roger W. Smith's Theodore Dreiser site 