The Project Gutenberg EBook of Twelve Men, by Theodore Dreiser

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

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 ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.

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