A Book of Prefaces

Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practises it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an u...

But of all this I shall say more later on, when I come to discuss the critical reception of the Dreiser novels, and the efforts made by the New York Society for the Suppression...

Here, in brief, you have the point of essential distinction between the stories of Conrad, a supreme artist in fiction, and the trashy confections of the literary artisans--_e.g...

And, in America, of nearly five out of five. Winston Churchill may serve as an example. He is a literary workman of very decent skill; the native critics speak of him with invar...

Occasionally, as I have said, a judge has revolted against this intolerable state of the court-and Comstock-made law, and directed a jury to disregard these astounding decisions...

How many remain? A few competent reviewers who are primarily something else--Harvey, Aikin, Untermeyer and company. A few youngsters on the newspapers, struggling against the bu...

[1] Joseph Conrad: A short study of his intellectual and emotional attitude toward his work and of the chief characteristics of his novels, by Wilson Follett; New York, Doubleda...

O Doctor _admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissimus_! Needless to say the universities have not overlooked this geyser of buttermilk: he is an honourary A.M. of Yale. His most res...

Such a man as this Cowperwood of the Chicago days, described romantically, would be indistinguishable from the wicked earls and seven-foot guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers...

In comstockery, if I do not err, the new Puritanism gave a sign of its formal departure from the old, and moral endeavour suffered a general overhauling and tightening of the sc...

I single out Dr. Sherman, not because his pompous syllogisms have any plausibility in fact or logic, but simply because he may well stand as archetype of the booming, indignant...

VENTURES INTO VERSE GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS MEN VERSUS THE MAN _With R. R. La Monte_ A LITTLE BOOK IN C MAJOR A BOOK OF CALUMNY [_The above books are out of print_] THE P...

"Calvinism," says Dr. Leon Kellner, in his excellent little history of American literature,[38] "is the natural theology of the disinherited; it never flourished, therefore, any...

But does all this argue a total lack of justice in the American character, or even a lack of common decency? I doubt that it would be well to go so far in accusation. What it do...

In brief, the literature of that whole period, as Algernon Tassin shows in "The Magazine in America,"[39] was almost completely disassociated from life as men were then living i...

[72] As a fair specimen of the sort of reasoning that prevails among the consecrated brethren I offer the following extract from an argument against birth control delivered by t...