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Show ANOTHER "AMERICAN TRAGEDY." The society of American literary super-excellents received quite a blow in New York the other evening when Sinclair Lewis, pride of the snobbiata, was roundly slapped by Theodore Dreiser, the apostle of American defeatism. de-featism. So serious and unexpected was the blow that the cheeks of the intelligentsia all over the country must have tingled when it was delivered. deli-vered. The two warriors of new thought were dining with a select group of men of letters in the Metropolitan club when the blow fell. Mr. Lewis stated that he felt disinclined to speak j in the presence of a man who . had stolen 3,000 words from his (Lewis) j wife's book on Russia. There was a i moment of strained silence, and then ; Mr. Dreiser, with open palm, struck I out mightily and slapped Mr. Lewis ! on the cheek. Not in a long time has so Babbittlike Babbitt-like an episode happened within the confines of the Metropolitan club. To the unbiased it would seem that Lewis showed great provincialism in accusing accus-ing his literary compatriot in stealing anything Russian. It is possible that he doesn't know that in things Russian Rus-sian there are no property rights, and that in the fatherland one takes what one wants providing one is big enough to get away with it, which few are, unless they belong to the inner in-ner circle. Mr. Dreiser explains by stating that he did not crib from Mrs. Sinclair's Sin-clair's monumental work on Russia but that he got his material from the same source, which was no doubt a release of the soviet publicity bureau, the only difference being perhaps . that Mrs. Sinclair saw it first. Anyhow it might have been another t American tragedy. Suppose that Mr. ; Dreiser had struck Mr. Sinclair hard ! enough to extinguish his literary light and then had had his own extinguished extinguish-ed by due process of law. America might then have plunged into literary barbarism. We hope the boys will be more careful in the future, and no doubt they will. |