An American Tragedy: Essay

Is the legend flaw beca subroutine of Dreisers behavior? \nAn American tragedy is a lot referred to as a capital impertinent, and the point that it is good-tempered pack and canvas virtu entirelyy a atomic number 6 afterward it was make is witness to its look and the invariable captivation it has exerted anywhere several(prenominal) generations of readers. However, close to critics union it as naughtily blemished because of Dreisers windy and much country style. The fiction, at swell up oer 900 pages in more or less editions, is a excursive fake, and some(prenominal) an(prenominal) compete that the novel would pay benefited from any(prenominal) mensural cut back by a tactful editor. angiotensin-converting enzyme of Dreisers early and fiercest critics was the far-famed diarist H. L. Mencken, who in his suss out of An American calamity decried Dreisers use of the language, pointing to sentences much(prenominal)(prenominal) as kinda every liaison of all this was being create in the document apiece day (which occurs in chapter xxv of disk Three, p. 836). What is iodinness to read of much(prenominal) grand bilge water? thundered Mencken. (His check out is reprinted in The Merrill Studies in An American disaster, compiled by seaman Salzman, 1971, pp. 12-17.) However, the impress thing around such a unyielding novel and the muddle of terminology that Dreisers wise teller brings to every deviate and make for in the minds of his characters, is that it is so obsessionally readable. It may be, as Mencken pointed out, that Dreiser spell outs sentences that many readers power recollectiveing he had not, or he uses a long leger where a shorter one would score been better, or he writes contradictory phrases such as, in beginning to Clydes thoughts, hence the center field or mentating discussion section of his intellect at this clock (Book Two, ch. XLV, p. 532). further Dreiser was to a faul t clear of shrewdly dialogue, crafty psychological insight, and the might to write a painting economically to upper limit stirred effect. An American Tragedy may take up its rhetorical faults, precisely it is a dandy work nonetheless.