Lynching in American Literature and Journalism consists of twelve essays investigating the history and development of writing about lynching as an American tragedy and the ugliest element of national character. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 European Americans. More than 73 percent of the lynchings in the Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. The Lynchings increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Reconstruction, after slavery had been abolished and free men gained the right to vote. The peak of lynching occurred in 1882, after Southern white Democrats had regained control of the state legislators. This book is a collection of historical and critical discussions of lynching in America that reflects the shameful, unmoral policies, and explores the topic of lynching within American history, literature, and journalism.

The Game as It Is Played comprises the best of Donald Pizer's essays on Theodore Dreiser. Pizer, one of Dreiser's principal critics over the past forty years, is especially concerned in establishing the distinctive nature and quality of Dreiser's naturalism in many of these essays. From one of Dreiser's earliest short stories to his acknowledged masterpiece, An American Tragedy, Pizer demonstrates that in Dreiser's hands naturalism is not the blunt instrument it is usually assumed to be but rather a powerful tool for the rendering of a complex view of the human condition. In addition, the essays explore several of the more controversial areas of Dreiser scholarship, including his late conversion to communism, his anti-Semitism, and the text of Sister Carrie.

The introduction by Donald Pizer describes in detail the biographical and historical background of the novel and its critical reputation. The four original essays in the volume not only touch on long-established approaches to Sister Carrie but also reflect a number of the concerns of recent scholarly and critical movements. Each of the essays is a self-standing examination of a major area of interest in the novel, including such topics as the impact of Dreiser's own life on the creation of Carrie and Hurstwood, the relationship of Carrie and the theater, and Dreiser's naturalism and his narrative technique.

A new appraisal of Dos Passos's work and life, Toward a Modernist Style describes both the central currents in his early work, and his full participation in literary modernism, culminating in his U.S.A. trilogy, as well as the relationship of these currents to those of an especially vibrant period in American expression. Donald Pizer charts the evolution of Dos Passos's artistic sensibility from its largely conventional expression at the start of the 1920s to the radical formal experimentation of U.S.A. at its close. He places this development in Dos Passos's writing in the context of contemporary ideas about art and society. Pizer also looks at the important roles that Dos Passos's expatriation and his relationship with Ernest Hemingway played in his work as well as his efforts as a painter and their relationship to his literary art. Toward a Modernist Style is both an incisive guide to a major American modernist as well as an exploration of the wider currents that created literary modernism in the early twentieth century.

The terms realism and naturalism are considered in the context of expressing a style of American writing in relation to late nineteenth century fiction movements. This text analyzes ten major texts, from W.D. Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham to Jack London's The Call of the Wild.

The introduction by Donald Pizer describes in detail the biographical and historical background of the novel and its critical reputation. The four original essays in the volume not only touch on long-established approaches to Sister Carrie but also reflect a number of the concerns of recent scholarly and critical movements. Each of the essays is a self-standing examination of a major area of interest in the novel, including such topics as the impact of Dreiser's own life on the creation of Carrie and Hurstwood, the relationship of Carrie and the theater, and Dreiser's naturalism and his narrative technique.

A new appraisal of Dos Passos's work and life, Toward a Modernist Style describes both the central currents in his early work, and his full participation in literary modernism, culminating in his U.S.A. trilogy, as well as the relationship of these currents to those of an especially vibrant period in American expression. Donald Pizer charts the evolution of Dos Passos's artistic sensibility from its largely conventional expression at the start of the 1920s to the radical formal experimentation of U.S.A. at its close. He places this development in Dos Passos's writing in the context of contemporary ideas about art and society. Pizer also looks at the important roles that Dos Passos's expatriation and his relationship with Ernest Hemingway played in his work as well as his efforts as a painter and their relationship to his literary art. Toward a Modernist Style is both an incisive guide to a major American modernist as well as an exploration of the wider currents that created literary modernism in the early twentieth century.

The Novels of Theodore Dreiser was first published in 1976. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Relying heavily on the manuscripts and letters in the Dreiser Collection of the University of Pennsylvania Library, Professor Pizer seeks to establish the facts of the sources and composition of each of Dreiser's eight novels and to study the themes and form of the completed works. In this study he relates what can be discovered about the factual reality of a novel to its imaginative reality. His interpretation of the novels avoids the suggestion that there is a single overriding theme or direction in Dreiser's work and emphasizes that Dreiser deserves examination primarily on the basis of the individuality and worth of each of his novels. A separate chapter is devoted to each of the novels: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The "Genius," The Financier, The Titan, An American Tragedy, The Bulwark, and The Stoic.

All of American author Frank Norris's significant critical writings have been compiled in this book, including his articles for the San Francisco Wave during 1896-1897 and selections from his "Weekly Letter" column for the Chicago American in 1901. Essays from these two previously unexploited sources, comprising almost half the book, reveal certain areas of Norris's thought which heretofore had been overlooked by scholars. This book was compiled in order to clarify Frank Norris's literary creed. When Donald Pizer began to read Norris's uncollected critical articles, he observed concepts which had been unnoted or misunderstood by his critics. Crediting this to the inadequate representation of Norris's ideas in the posthumous The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903), Pizer recognized the need for an interpretive and complete edition of Norris's critical writings. This volume thus fills a noticeable gap in the field of American literary criticism. By the time of his death in 1902 Norris had a closed system of critical ideas. This core of ideas, however, is only peripherally related to the conventional concept of literary naturalism, which perhaps explains why critics have gone astray trying to find Zolaesque ideas in Norris's criticism. Norris's central idea, around which he built an aesthetic of the novel, was that the best novel combines an intensely primitivistic subject matter and theme with a highly sophisticated form. His paradox of sophisticated primitivism clarifies the vital link between the fiction produced in the 1890s and that written by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. Norris's essays deal with many of the literary themes which preoccupy modern critical theorists. His range of subjects includes the form and function of the novel; definitions of naturalism, realism, and romanticism; and the problem of what constitutes an American novel. His interpretation of commonplace events, his comments on prominent figures of his day, and his parodies of writers such as Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, and Rudyard Kipling are characterized by ingenuity and perception. Through these writings the personality of a man with well-defined convictions and the ability to expound them provocatively comes into sharp focus. In a general introduction Pizer summarizes Norris's critical position and surveys his career as literary critic. This introduction and the interpretative introductions preceding each section constitute an illuminating essay on the literary temper of the period and provide a new insight into Norris' craft and his literary philosophy.

"American Naturalism and the Jews" examines the unabashed anti-Semitism of five notable American naturalist novelists otherwise known for their progressive social values. Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser all pushed for social improvements for the poor and oppressed, while Edith Wharton and Willa Cather both advanced the public status of women. But they all also expressed strong prejudices against the Jewish race and faith throughout their fiction, essays, letters, and other writings, producing a contradiction in American literary history that has stymied scholars and, until now, gone largely unexamined. In this breakthrough study, Donald Pizer confronts this disconcerting strain of anti-Semitism pervading American letters and culture, illustrating how easily prejudice can coexist with even the most progressive ideals.

Pizer shows how these writers' racist impulses represented more than just personal biases, but resonated with larger social and ideological movements within American culture. Anti-Semitic sentiment motivated such various movements as the western farmers' populist revolt and the East Coast patricians' revulsion against immigration, both of which Pizer discusses here. This antagonism toward Jews and other non-Anglo-Saxon ethnicities intersected not only with these authors' social reform agendas but also with their literary method of representing the overpowering forces of heredity, social or natural environment, and savage instinct.

This research work deals with subjects of great interest in current criticism---the impact of the New Historicist studies on the interpretation of American literary naturalism, and the issue of the possible persistence of the movement in contemporary fiction. Other essays deal with Norris, Crane and Dreiser who have up to now been considered canonical figures within literary naturalism while Wharton and Chopin are discussed as recent and welcome additions to the discussion of this movement and American literature in general. This work should be seen as a successor to Pizer's well received THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM (1993).