SOURCE: Introduction to Free and Other Stories, The Modern Library, 1918, pp. v-x.

In the following introduction to Dreiser's Free and Other Stories, Anderson offers a laudatory assessment of Dreiser's literary achievements as well as of his personal integrity and commitment to honesty in his writing.

Theodore Dreiser is a man who, with the passage of time, is bound to loom larger and larger in the awakening aesthetic consciousness of America. Among all of our prose writers he is one of the few men of whom it may be said that he has always been an honest workman, always impersonal, never a trickster. Read this book of Dreiser's, Free and Other Stories, and then compare it with a book of short stories, say by Bret Harte or O. Henry. The tradition of trick writing began early among us in America and has flowered here like some strange fungus growth...