I hate to tell you, but I've never read Dreiser. I kinda bounced around the tracking system in public school like a ping-pong ball. My understanding is that James Joyce is the all-time most boring author in history, and that the literati like to talk about him because he is so incoherent that it makes them seem smart.
OTOH, I've also heard the literati complain that people bought "A Brief History of Time" to make themselves look smart, but that no-one could actually read it. To the contrary, I found it had a most brilliant manner of teaching the abstractions of physics to the hoi palloi. I think the literati might simply not be that smart. I mean how many critics complained they couldn't follow Mission Impossible, a movie based on a Tom-and-Jerry episode, for Pete's sake.