This collection presents eleven of Dreiser's best tales, ranging from trenchant social analysis to penetrating character study.One of Dreiser's most powerful stories, "N****r Jeff" was occasioned when Dreiser was forced to witness a lynching, an experience that disturbed him deeply.H. L. Mencken was a great champion of Dreiser during his lifetime, declaring that:"He is a great artist, and that no other American of his generation left so wide and handsome a mark upon the national letters. American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin. He was a man of large originality, of profound feeling, and of unshakable courage. All of us who write are better off because he lived, worked, and hoped." "Theodore Dreiser is a man who, with the passage of time, is bound to loom larger and larger in the awakening aesthetic consciousness of America. Among all of our prose writers he is one of the few men of whom it may be said that he has always been an honest workman, always impersonal, never a trickster. Read this book of Dreiser's Free And Other Stories, and then compare it with a book of short stories, say by Bret Harte or O. Henry."