It is a healthy creature, growing
quite regularly to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds, and
living a comfortable, lengthy existence because of its very
remarkable ability to adapt itself to conditions....
Or this from his pamphlet, "Life, Art and America":[19]
Alas, alas! for art in America. It has a hard stubby row to hoe.
But I offer no more examples. Every reader of the Dreiser novels must
cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of
whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many
lumps of sodium hyposulphite. Here and there, as in parts of "The Titan"
and again in parts of "A Hoosier Holiday," an evil conscience seems to
haunt him and he gives hard striving to his manner, and more than once
there emerges something that is almost graceful. But a backsliding
always follows this phosphorescence of reform. "The 'Genius,'" coming
after "The Titan," marks the high tide of his bad writing. There are
passages in it so clumsy, so inept, so irritating that they seem almost
unbelievable; nothing worse is to be found in the newspapers.
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