The date 1925 helps us to look at Theodore Dreiser’s work through a clear mental lens, unblurred by the political-cultural wars that have clouded estimates of Dreiser’s reputation ever since. Nineteen twenty-five was the date of Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy and much else in that annus mirabilis at the center of what deserves, like the 1850s, to be called an American Renaissance. Dreiser merits rescue now—at least Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy do.

In a famous and deservedly influential essay entitled “Reality in America” (1946), Lionel Trilling used Dreiser as an example of what he wished to censure. His essay—in part an attack on the cultural history of V. L. Parrington—can also be read as an anticipatory answer to F. O. Matthiessen’s advocacy of Dreiser in Theodore Dreiser (1951), published the year after Matthiessen’s suicide. Trilling was intent upon defending the activity of literature—writing it, reading it, discussing it—against an assortment of simplifiers, because, as he said in the Preface to The Liberal Imagination (1950), “literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of the variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty” of experience. Among the simplifications were the hearty progressive ideology of Parrington, the reductions of Alfred Kinsey’s sexology, and the tendency of liberalism to slide in the direction of fellow-traveling and Stalinism.

Trilling in this essay courageously entered what he called “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” The dates of his treatment of Dreiser—April 1946