Twelve Men

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Twelve Men, by Theodore Dreiser

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Title: Twelve Men

Author: Theodore Dreiser

Release Date: January 17, 2005 [EBook #14717]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TWELVE MEN ***

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TWELVE MEN

BY

Theodore Dreiser

1919

Contents

I

Peter

II

A Doer of the Word

III

My Brother Paul

IV

The Country Doctor

V

Culhane, the Solid Man

VI

A True Patriarch

VII

De Maupassant, Jr.

VIII

The Village Feudists

IX

Vanity, Vanity

X

The Mighty Rourke

XI

A Mayor and His People

XII

W.L.S.

Peter

In any group of men I have ever known, speaking from the point of view of character and not that of physical appearance, Peter would stand out as deliciously and irrefutably different. In the great waste of American intellectual dreariness he was an oasis, a veritable spring in the desert. He understood life. He knew men. He was free—spiritually, morally, in a thousand ways, it seemed to me.

As one drags along through this inexplicable existence one realizes how such qualities stand out; not the pseudo freedom of strong men, financially or physically, but the real, internal, spiritual freedom, where the mind, as it were, stands up and looks at itself, faces Nature unafraid, is aware of its own weaknesses, its strengths; examines its own and the creative impulses of the universe and of men with a kindly and non-dogmatic eye, in fact kicks dogma out of doors, and yet deliberately and of choice holds fast to many, many simple and human things, and rounds out life, or would, in a natural, normal, courageous, healthy way.

The first time I ever saw Peter was in St. Louis in 1892; I had come down from Chicago to work on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and he was a part of the art department force of that paper. At that time—and he never seemed to change later even so much as a hair’s worth until he died in 1908—he was short, stocky and yet quick and even jerky in his manner, with a bushy, tramp-like “get-up” of hair and beard, most swiftly