Quotation by Alfred Kazin

The nearest analogy to Dreiser's "personal realism" is to be found in the painter Edward Hopper, who shares Dreiser's passion for transcendent writers, for images of trains and roads. Despite his similar choice of "ordinary" subjects, Hopper has written that his aim "has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature." ... One feels in the awkwardness, the dreaming stillness of Hopper's figures, the same struggle to express the ultimate confrontation of men and things that one does in Dreiser's reverent descriptions of saloons, street-cars, trains, hotels, offices.