Books by Donald Pizer

Since its 1925 publication, Manhattan Transfer has been widely recognized as a landmark in American modernism both for its jaundiced portrayal of the American Dream and for its experimentation with the novel form. Clear, factual annotations by the world's leading expert on Dos Passos's fi ction guides readers through the novel's dense representation of life in New York City during the turbulent early decades of the new century.

A penetrating study of the anti-Semitic attitudes held by major American naturalist authors

In this collection of essays on Hamlin Garland, Donald Pizer attempts to re-establish the wealth and importance of the early work and activities of the radical, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer from the Midwest. Essays in the opening half of the book are devoted to Garland's radical economic and artistic beliefs and activities, while those in the second part concentrate on his most permanent, well-known work of this period: 'Main-Travelled Roads, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly', and 'A Son of the Middle Border'.In the preface to this volume, Pizer traces the overall coherence of Garland's early ideas and fiction. Garland, Pizer demonstrates, found in his reading of radical writers of the period an explanation of the hardships and limitations of prairie life that he had personally experienced; he then translated this union of concept and actuality into a powerful expressive tool in his acclaimed prairie fictions.Pizer includes several of his late essays on Garland in this book, in which he suggests, on the basis of his own critical development, that Garland's finest writing dealing with late nineteenth-century Midwestern life also contains sexual and Edenic themes which transcend the immediate social and economic conditions of this period and help to explain the significance and lastingness of his early body of work.

The Game as It Is Played comprises the best of Donald Pizer's essays on Theodore Dreiser. 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.