Adventures of a Y.M.C.A. Lad: "When I reach the shades at last it will no doubt astonish Satan to discover, on thumbing my dossier, that I was once a member of the Y.M.C.A. Yet, a fact is a fact. What is more remarkable, I was not recruited by a missionary to the heathen, but joined at the suggestion of my father, who enjoyed and deserved the name of an infidel. [...] Apparently he was convinced that exercise on the wooden horse and flying rings would cure my scholarly stoop, and make a kind of grenadier of me. If so, he was in error, for I remain more or less Bible-backed to this day, and am often mistaken for a Talmudist." (18)

Theodore Dreisel: "Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practices it - an endless piling up of minutiae, an...