Love Quote by Marguerite Young

Fandom usually hides behind taste; Marguerite Young turns it into a social boundary. Her gush over Dreiser, followed by the near-comic threat of refusing to speak to his detractors, is less about literary evaluation than about allegiance. The ellipses matter: they perform a breathless, intimate immediacy, like you’re overhearing a private confession that escalates into a vow. She’s not arguing that Dreiser is flawless. She’s signaling that attacking him violates a code.

The subtext is protective identification. Dreiser, long branded as clumsy, vulgar, and morally suspect by gatekeepers, became a lightning rod in American letters: naturalism, sex, class mobility, the raw mechanics of desire and money. To love him was to side with a certain kind of novelistic honesty, the ungenteel America that polite criticism tried to edit out. Young’s refusal to “almost” speak to Dreiser’s attackers dramatizes how aesthetic judgments are never purely aesthetic. They’re proxy wars over what counts as serious art and who gets to define it.

There’s also a sly self-positioning at work. Young, an author with her own mythic reputation and avant-garde ambitions, aligns herself with Dreiser’s outsider heft rather than the clean, manicured tradition. The line is funny because it’s disproportionate; it’s sharp because it’s true to how literary culture actually operates: not as a seminar, but as a network of loyalties, grudges, and reputations defended like family.