Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub

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Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life
HeyRubADubDub.jpg
First edition
AuthorTheodore Dreiser
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genrephilosophy
PublisherBoni & Liveright
Publication date
1920

Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life is a collection of twenty essays by Theodore Dreiser.

Contents[]

  • "Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub"
  • "Change"
  • "Some Aspects of Our National Character"
  • "The Dream"
  • "The American Financier"
  • "The Toil of the Laborer"
  • "Personality"
  • "A Counsel to Perfection"
  • "Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse"
  • "Secrecy-Its Value"
  • "Ideals, Morals, and the Daily Newspaper"
  • "Equation Inevitable"
  • "Phantasmagoria"
  • "Ashtoreth"
  • "The Reformer"
  • "Marriage and Divorce"
  • "More Democracy or Less? An Inquiry"
  • "The Essential Tragedy of Life"
  • "Life, Art and America"
  • "The Court of Progress"

Literary significance and criticism[]

Six essays and one play had already been published in newspapers prior to this collection.[1]

Keith Newlin has argued that Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub follows in the wake of Dreiser's attempts at philosophy, which he had started in his 1916 book called and ended with , published posthumously in 1974.[1]

The collection was castigated by reviewers from the New York Evening Post, the and The New Republic, though Dreiser held it in high regard.[1] Carl Van Doren pointed out Dreiser's inability to sustain his arguments.[2] H.L. Mencken lampooned it.[3]

The book draws upon Jacques Loeb's The Mechanistic Conception of Life (1912).[4]

References[]

  1. ^ a b c Keith Newlin, A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2003, p. 189 [1]
  2. ^ Carl Van Doren, The American Novel, Read Books, 2006, p. 255
  3. ^ Vincent Fitzpatrick, H. L. Mencken, Mercer University Press, 2004, p. 51 [2]
  4. ^ Jeremy Loving, The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2005, p. 283 [3]


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