Nigger Jeff and Other Stories

The place Theodore Dreiser holds in American literature is extremely honorable. He is considered the founder of American naturalism. Someone criticizes him for wordiness and awkwardness of style, but no one denies his immense talent for observation and thinking—fearlessly exploding whole layers of life.

There is something heavy, age-old, and unbreakable in Dreiser’s literary concepts: acceptance of life, depiction of life, breathing with life—without trying to understand it and explain it.