4 JANUARY 1946, Page 9

Ordinary readers—I will not say admirers—of Theodore Dreiser's works will,

I should imagine, have read with some surprise the depreciatory obituary notice of him in Monday's Times. Take one judgement alone: " The earnest, massive, but fatiguing An American Tragedy, an over-praised book." Well, anyone, of course, is free to think that, and to say that. Equally anyone is free to express astonishment, as I take leave to do, at such a verdict. To me this deeply moving novel has always' seemed charged with all the relent- less inevitability of a Greek tragedy. That I am not alone in this I know. I may be in a minority, but I doubt it.

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