Some knowledge of another side of Mr. Dreiser’s life, however, during his years of work for the news-sheets, is also necessary for those who would understand his novels. He has told us that in St. Louis the great literary idol of his associates was Zola, and after Zola, Balzac. These novelists, and especially the former, were constantly held up to him as models by one of his assignment-editors, who made it abundantly clear what Zola stood for. Mr. Dreiser read none of the Frenchman’s books at this time, but he did read an unpublished novel by two St. Louis newspaper men which made a deep and lasting impression upon him and which, as he later discovered, was wholly inspired by Zola and Balzac. This was “the opening wedge for him into the realm of realism,” and, too, “it fixed his mind definitely on this matter of writing,” firing him with a desire to create something of the sort himself. He thought the novel “intensely beautiful,” “with its frank pictures of raw, greedy, sensual human nature, and its open pictures of self-indulgence and vice.” In these indirect ways, evidently, Zola exerted upon the young reporter an influence real and significant. It was, indeed, probably much more important than the direct influence exerted by Balzac not long thereafter; though the accident which brought Mr. Dreiser to a fevered and ecstatic reading of many of Balzac’s novels, while he was in Pittsburgh, marked what was for him “a literary revolution.” The crowning stage of Mr. Dreiser’s education, however, was now to come, while he was still in Pittsburgh, with his discovery of certain of the writings of Huxley, Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer. Huxley, Mr. Dreiser credits with finally dispelling the “lingering filaments” of Christianity still trailing about him; and Huxley’s work of dispersion was completed by Spencer’s _First Principles_. This book wholly “threw him down in his conceptions or non-conceptions of life” by its “questioning or dissolving into other and less understandable things” all that he had deemed substantial. “Up to this time,” he says, “there had been in me a blazing and unchecked desire to get on and the feeling that in doing so we did get somewhere; now in its place was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that there was no hereafter, that one lived and had his being because one had to, and that it was of no importance. Of one’s ideals, struggles, deprivations, sorrows and joys, it could only be said that they were chemic compulsions.... Man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and a badly and carelessly driven one at that.”