[In the following review of Free and Other Stones, which was originally published in Smart Set, Vol. 57, in November, 1918, Mencken asserts that the most successful of the stories in the collection are constructed as chapters of novels, and that the works which are self-contained, more traditional short stories are failures, because Dreiser's writing style does not lend itself to this form.]

The eleven pieces in Free and Other Stories, by Theodore Dreiser, are the by-products of a dozen years of industrious novel-writing, and are thus somewhat miscellaneous in character and quality. They range from experiments in the fantastic to ventures into realism, and, in tone, from the satirical to the rather laboriously moral. The best of them are "The Lost Phoebe," "The Cruise of the Idlewild," "The Second Choice" and "Free." The last-named is a detailed and searching analysis of a disparate marriage that has yet survived for forty years—an elaborate study of a life-long conflict between impulse and aspiration on the one hand and fear and conformity on the other. Here Dreiser is on his own ground, for the thing is not really a short story, in any ordinary sense, but a chapter from a novel, and he manœuvres in it in his customary deliberate and spacious manner. "The Second Choice" is of much the same character—a presentation of the processes of mind whereby a girl deserted by the man she loves brings herself to marriage with one she doesn't love at all. Those of the stories that are more properly short stories in form are less successful; for example, "A Story of Stories," "Old Rogaun and His Theresa" and "Will You Walk Into My Parlor?" The true short story, in fact, lies as far outside Dreiser's natural field as the triolet or the mazurka. He needs space and time to get his effects; he must wash in his gigantic backgrounds, and build up his characters slowly. The mountebankish smartness and neatness of the Maupassant-O. Henry tradition are quite beyond him. He is essentially a serious man, and a melancholy. The thing that interests him most is not a deftly articulated series of events but a gradual transformation of personality, and particularly a transformation that involves the decay of integrity. The characters that live most brilliantly in his books, like those that live most brilliantly in the books of Conrad, are characters in disintegration—corroded, beaten, destroyed by the inexplicable mystery of existence.

In the midst of many reminders of his high talents, Dreiser's worst failing as a practical writer appears with painful vividness in this book. I allude to his astonishing carelessness, his irritating slovenliness. He seems to have absolutely no respect for words as words—no sense of their inner music, no hand whatever for their adept combination. One phrase, it would seem, pleases him quite as much as another phrase. If it is flat, familiar, threadbare, so much the better. It is not, indeed, that he hasn't an ear. As a matter of fact, his hearing is very sharp, and in his dialogue, particularly when dealing with ignorant characters, he comes very close to the actual vulgate of his place and time. But the difficulty is that this vulgate bulges beyond the bounds of dialogue: it gets into what he has to say himself, unpurged by anything even remotely resembling taste. The result is often a series of locutions that affects so pedantic a man as I am like music on a fiddle out of tune, or a pretty girl with beer-keg ankles, or mayonnaise on ice-cream.