I prefer to write of what Dreiser has done in The “Genius” than to tell in detail of what it is about. Calmly, aloofly with a consummate dispassion Dreiser has thrust his magic pen home into the heart of American Puritanism. God forgive him. God forgive the publishers. God forgive everybody who reads the book and forgive me who write about it. For American Puritanism is a sacred thing, as sacred as the gilt on the cathedral altar places, as hallowed as the bathroom in a bawdy house. And Dreiser has peeled off the gilt and ruthlessly thrust open the door. May he be cursed with the wrath of an avenging public conscience. May he be made to wither under the distinction of being a maniacal sensualist, a libidinous ruffian, a lascivious distiller of corrupting langours. Amen. Against the gray-dirt background, the shallow-hued smears of his many contemporaries, Dreiser’s book stands forth like a red cry of truth. It is not the book of a man enraged with the narrowness of a country, sputtering against the insipidity of its composite ideals. Dreiser never descends to the punitive hectoring of a Robert Herrick. Nor does he join the plaintive assaults upon the pusillanimous conventions which characterize the “advanced” fiction of the country. He does not make his men and women vehicles for the antiquated day dream of brotherhood bosh. He does not prostitute his work in dramatizing the current quibbles, marketing asinine public convulsions in the literary capsules so commonly compounded by our quack “creators.” All these things he does not do and if the reading public of today will not reward him, the God of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Huysmanns, Shakespeare and Ambrose Bierce will.