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...