SOURCE: "Strange Bedfellows: The Waste Land and An American Tragedy," in The Twenties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, edited by Warren French, Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1975, pp. 51-64.

In the following essay, Harter argues that despite being antithetical in most ways, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and An American Tragedy share a similar view of the human condition "as it is manifested in the modem world."

It is difficult to imagine any two contemporary men of letters more dissimilar than Theodore Dreiser and T. S. Eliot. They are not merely unlike by virtue of ethnic, religious and economic background, professional interests, education, philosophy, and temperament; as artists they represent antagonistic—even irreconcilable polarities: Dreiser epitomizes the naturalist, journalistfictionalizer, while Eliot remains the quintessentially allusive metaphysician, aesthetician-poet. Indeed, despite the fact that The Waste Land was published only three years prior to the publication of An American Tragedy, the dissimilarities between...