"The Game as It Is Played"

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.

Donald Pizer received his PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. He spent his entire career at Tulane University, in New Orleans, from where he retired in 2001 as Pierce Butler Professor of English. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and has also received major research awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published widely on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, including critical studies of Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos as well as many editions of the works of these and other authors of the period.