Theodore Dreiser

Peter was a man who understood life, knew men, wore good and yet exceedingly mussy clothes, and loved life. He pitied ignorance and necessity, and was intense, nervous, rapid-talking,...

Noank is a little played-out fishing town on the southeastern coast of Connecticut. Charlie Potter is contented, works at a shipyard, and gives his rubber boots away to old drunken Jimmy...

As I look back on my life, the only one who truly understood me was this same Paul, my dearest brother. He was always sad over those who had once been prosperous but who were now old and...

My father had gall stones and the doctor came. He left some new cure and left again, and I never quite forgave him for not making me wait and go back with him. The doctor was indifferent to actual...

I met my prospective host in his stables, which contained every type of fashionable vehicle and sixty or seventy of the worst horses. A lean and haughty-looking individual walked in and remarked...

A true patriarch lived in a moderate-sized county seat in Missouri, dispensing sympathy and becoming an haranguing prophet. He refused to go to church and used all his art to soothe a...

In the spring of 1906, a stocky, sturdy, penetrative temperament of not more than twenty-four or five years of age dawned on me. He bristled, but I wanted something interesting and get paid for...

A groceryman by the name of Elihu Burridge lived in a certain Connecticut fishing-town, and was terribly strong on religion. The postmaster and Noank were at odds over this subject, and I said that...

I first met X at twenty. He controlled four banks, one trust company, an insurance company, a fire insurance company. De Shay invited me to his studio and then to his country house on Long Island,...

Matt first met Rourke when he was laying the foundation for a small dynamo in the engine-room of the repair shop at Spike. Rourke was the foreman-mason for minor tasks for all that part of the...

The mayor of one of those dreary New England mill towns in northern Massachusetts sensed the evils of great and often unnecessary social inequalities and the need of reorganizing influences. The...

W.L.S. - - , Jr., was a small, wiry, lean-looking individual arrayed in a bicycle suit. He wore a close, sharp-pointed Vandyke beard and gold-bridge glasses. He talked with the greatest ease upon a...