The "Genius" (novel)

The credit he felt he deserved (and did not receive) for his honesty about sexual urges and damaged relationships and his original publisher's decision not to stand by the novel in the face of criticism contributed to his lifelong feeling that the book had never been given its due.

[5] While the protagonist of the book is in many ways a portrait of its author, Dreiser also loosely based Eugene Witla on some of the painters, artists working in an Ashcan realist style, whom he knew in New York at the time and whose studios he visited.

"[7] The Kansas City Star, like many Midwestern dailies, went much further and labeled the novel "a procession of sordid philandering", while the Milwaukee Journal derided Dreiser as a "literary Caliban", wallowing in depravity.

[11] John Cowper Powys was one of the few major critics to be unqualified in his praise of the book, comparing Dreiser's fearlessness about sex and even his admittedly excessive detail to Walt Whitman's erotic openness and love of long poetic catalogs.

[12] Edgar Lee Masters, author of Spoon River Anthology, and literary radical Randolph Bourne wrote in Dreiser's defense as well, as did noted publisher and editor Marion Reedy.

[13] Many libraries and bookstores refused to stock the book, and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice threatened legal action, leading Dreiser's supporters to issue their own call to arms.

[14] Critic Willard Huntington Wright, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Smart Set and a Dreiser fan of long standing, threw himself "wholeheartedly into an anti-censorship campaign on behalf of [the novel].

Along with Alfred Knopf, John Cowper Powys, publisher Ben Huebsch, and Mencken, [he] circulated petitions and drummed up support wherever he could for the man he believed to be the most significant, unjustly harassed writer of the day.