SOURCE: "Dreiser in 840 Pages," in the American Mercury, Vol. 7, No. 17, March, 1926, pp. 379-81.

In the following essay, Mencken praises the second volume of An American Tragedy, but calls the first "vast, sloppy, chaotic. "

Whatever else this vasty double-header [An American Tragedy] may reveal about its author, it at least shows brilliantly that he is wholly devoid of what may be called literary tact. A more artful and ingratiating fellow, facing the situation that confronted him, would have met it with a far less difficult book. It was ten years since he had published his last novel, and so all his old customers, it is reasonable to assume, were hungry for another—all his old customers and all his new customers. His publisher, after a long and gallant battle, had at last chased off the comstocks. Rivals, springing up at intervals, had all succumbed—or, what is the same...