SOURCE: "The Short Story in Transition: Stephen Crane, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser," in The American Short Story: A Critical Survey, University of Oklahoma Press, 1973, pp. 157-82.

In the following excerpt, Voss surveys several of Dreiser's short stories, and maintains that while the short story form did not lend itself to Dreiser's particular writing style, "few other short-story writers have written more powerfully and movingly on the theme of entrapment."

Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, of German stock, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1946) was a journalist in his late twenties, who had worked in St. Louis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh when he began to write fiction. He was unfavorably regarded for a number of years by many readers and critics because of the uncompromising naturalism and alleged immorality of Sister Carrie (1900), suppressed after publication by the publisher and not reissued until 1907, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and later novels. It...