Theodore Dreiser is one of the most significant and most problematical of American writers. His place in American literary history is secure. The acknowledged "trailblazer" for a generation of early twentieth-century American writers, his rebellious commitment to the honest portrayal of American life and the vagaries of human nature placed him in the forefront of American literature about the time of World War I. The great popular and critical success of An American Tragedy in 1925 solidified his American and international reputations. But from the publication of Sister Carrie in 1900, Dreiser was also a byword for all that is inept in fiction and fuzzy in thinking. By the time Lionel Trilling launched his famous attack on him in 1950 (in Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, some five years after Dreiser's death), it was often assumed that Dreiser wrote like a journalist and thought like an adolescent. Yet somehow, despite continuous attack, Dreiser's best fiction continues to hold and move.
