If the truth is to be told, one reason for this lay clearly within himself. For he was, as his records show him, a stupid boy and young man, lapped in vague reverie and hazy dreams of enjoyment, and roused slowly to puzzled observation and thought. “No common man am I,” he used to tell himself when he was scarcely out of his ’teens, with no evident reason save that with adolescence came an intense craving for freedom from the shackles of common life--freedom to indulge fully his temperamental longing for sensuous and materialised delight. This self-conceit helped to prevent him from learning what could have been learned during his boyhood, and, as he grew older, aroused in him bitter resentment against the limitations of his early environment. Those limitations, at the same time, were extreme. The Dreiser household was one combining almost unrelieved ignorance with perfect tastelessness, presided over by a father whose consuming interest was a Catholicism degraded into mere ceremonies and prohibitions. Mr. Dreiser explicitly denotes the quality of the purifying influence dominant in the home and community of his youth: “One should read only good books ... from which any reference to sex had been eliminated, and what followed ... was that all intelligent interpretation of character and human nature was immediately discounted. A picture of a nude or partially nude woman was sinful.... The dance in our home and our town was taboo. The theatre was an institution which led to crime, the saloon a centre of low, even bestial vices.... It was considered good business, if you please, to be connected with some religious organisation.... We were taught persistently to shun most human experiences as either dangerous or degrading or destructive. The less you knew about life the better; the more you knew about the fictional heaven and hell ditto.... In my day there were apparently no really bad men who were not known as such to all the world, ... and few if any good men who were not sufficiently rewarded by the glorious fruits of their good deeds here and now!... Positively, and I stake my solemn word on this, until I was between seventeen and eighteen I had scarcely begun to suspect any other human being of harbouring the erratic and sinful thoughts which occasionally flashed through my own mind.”