In a mid-twentieth-century essay for the Yale Review, the celebrated philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch argues that the specific purpose of serious novels and other narrative fiction is to explore the moral operations of character in imaginatively credible contexts of human agency. In her view, while some authors (such as Walter Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Leo Tolstoy) perform this job effectively and well, others—which she identifies as artistic products of alternative philosophical traditions of (on the one hand) idealism and (on the other) empiricism, either shirk or fail this task. This paper examines key works by Dostoevsky and Dreiser—authors who seem to fall short of Murdoch’s test of the good novelist on diverse scores—to the end of judging her account of the good or serious novel to be unhelpfully narrow and procrustean.