SOURCE: "William James, Theodore Dreiser and the 'Anaesthetic Revelation," in American Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring, 1983, pp. 5-18.
In the following essay, Boren explores the paradox in post-Darwinian American culture between pragmatism and the pervasive sense of doom characteristic of the machine age, embodied by the respective ideas of William James and Theodore Dreiser, and the subsequent experimentations with drugs by both writers.
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