Imagine an Ayn Rand novel written by a socialist, and you have some idea of the intellectual and moral universe of Theodore Dreiser’s trilogy of novels, The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic.
Like the United States, France is a melting pot. But while on this side of the Atlantic newcomers came to the United States, on the other it was France that came to the newcomers.
“An Ayn Rand novel written by a socialist” was my assessment of Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier. That description applies even more forcefully to Dreiser’s sequel, The Titan.
Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s — the booming home of a glamorous new industry, a place where huge fortunes were conjured in years, sometimes months.
Mitt Romney often joked during the primaries: “Being a conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.” Try that joke the other way around, and it doesn’t work, does it?
Negative reviews of Jude the Obscure so jolted Thomas Hardy that he left off writing narrative fiction ever after. For the remaining 33 years of his life, he devoted his literary energies exclusively to poetry.
Robert Novak wrote Prince of Darkness (according to his publicity materials) to vindicate himself and to settle scores. Among those scores are one with former diplomat Joe Wilson, and another with me.
Edith Wharton seems at one point to have intended The Custom of the Country as a feminist novel, an expose of the harm done to women by their exclusion from public life.