His social studies are always viewed from an individual angle. He can picture the American scene with the matter-of-fact precision of an expert reporter, a reporter almost entirely devoid of imagination, but with a love for scrutinizing the human heart. He is less interested in America at large than in the Americans, and less in the Americans than in humanity as such. This gives him a large outlook despite his apparent narrowness. One of his familiar points is the disintegration of a character under the pressure of the environment. Even when he stages a social tragedy, as he did in “The Financier” and “The Titan,” he locates it within an individual conscience. Let us get at Dreiser’s pedigree by the same biographical method which he applies to the characters in his books. He was born in a small Indiana town in 1871. His father was an emigrant from the Rhineland who came to America to escape conscription. Though a nonconformist in politics, he was a strict adherent of Roman Catholicism. He did not make a success of his life and may be taken as a prototype of what his son calls the “undermen.” He had nothing Nietzschean in him. There were thirteen children in the family, and Theodore came next to the last, an offspring of that mysterious biological evolution with which, as an author, he was going to be so much concerned. One of his brothers, Paul, had an artistic temperament and was not without literary talent. Theodore has drawn his portrait in “Twelve Men.” Paul Dreiser, or Dresser, was a seductive Bohemian, a sort of Rameau’s nephew, several of whose popular songs are still remembered. Of his sisters Theodore Dreiser tells us that, like the Jennie Gerhardts and Sister Carries of his novels, several of them eloped early from home in order to escape utter poverty. Theodore himself had to set to menial work to make a living at an early age. He took up odd jobs and after a hurried flight through college, he began as a reporter wandering from city to city, from Saint Louis to Chicago and then to Pittsburgh and New York. He always felt an instinctive craving for living close to everyday life and for observing things and people around him with a keen and circumstantiated attention, which never excluded a sort of underground and subdued pity. Never a sentimentalist, Dreiser was however always deeply human. He completed his apprenticeship as a writer in the midst of an intimate contact with life, collecting the material for his books at first hand. While running errands as a reporter he would brood over his impressions, in the company of a few enthusiastic friends, after feverishly reading Balzac and Émile Zola. His friends encouraged him to write about people just as he found them around him.