one occasion, before he had been taken on the
street in this fashion, other boys had called to
him and made fun of his father, because he
was always publicly emphasizing his religious
beliefs or convictions. Thus in one neighbor
hood in which they had lived, when he was
but a child of seven, his father, having always
preluded every conversation with “praise the
lord,” he heard boys call “Here comes old
praisethelord griffiths.” or they would call
out after him “Hey, you’re the fellow whose
sister plays the organ. is there anything else
she can play?”
“What does he always want to go around
saying, ‘praise the lord’ for? other people don’t
do it.”
it was that old mass yearning for a like
ness in all things that troubled them, and him.
neither his father nor his mother was like
other people, because they were always making
so much of religion, and now at last they were
making a business of it.
From an american Tragedy. After various marital
and familial hardships, as well as the poor sales of
his first novel, sister Carrie, Dreiser fell into a
suicidal depression and went to a sanitarium in
1901. He then worked for the next nine years as an
editor of women’s magazines, publishing his second
novel, Jennie gerhardt, in 1911. H. L. Mencken
once wrote that Dreiser’s life and work would itself
“make a novel in Dreiser’s best manner—a novel
without the slightest hint of a moral.” He died at
the age of seventy-four in 1945.
