A BOOK ABOUT MYSELF by THEODORE DREISER. Text extracted from opening pages of book: CHAPTER I. DURING the year 1890 I had been formulating my first dim notion as to what it was I wanted to do in life. For two years and more I had been reading Eugene Field's Sharps and Flats/ 7 a column he wrote daily for the Chicago Daily News, and through this, the various phases of life which he suggested in a humorous though at times romantic way, I was beginning to suspect, vaguely at first, that I wanted to write, possibly something like that. Nothing else that I had so far read novels, plays, poems, histories gave me quite the same feeling for constructive thought as did the matter of his daily notes, poems, and aphorisms, which were of Chicago principally, whereas nearly all others dealt with foreign scenes and people. But this comment on local life here and now, these tren chant bits on local street scenes, institutions, characters, func tions, all moved me as nothing hitherto had. To me Chic