SOURCE: "An American Tragedy," in The Dial, Vol. LXXX, 1926, pp. 331-38.

In the following review, Powys praises the scope and vision of An American Tragedy.

The fact that Theodore Dreiser's new novel [An American Tragedy] seems likely to leave many readers repulsed and many critics confounded does not detract from its value. Its cold Acherontic flood pursues its way, owing little, if anything, to the human qualities that disarm, endear, or beguile, owing nothing to the specious intellectual catchwords of the hour. The pleasure to be derived from it is grim, stark, austere, a purely aesthetic pleasure, unpropitious to such as require human cajolery in these high matters.

To use the expression "objective" with regard to it is only illuminating if what one means is that the writer's energy is so powerful that his vision of things is projected to a certain distance from himself; to such a...