World-famous for his novels Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, Theodore Dreiser was also highly accomplished in journalism, autobiography, and travel writing. In 1919 Dreiser proposed to publish a "book of characters" that would collect twelve biographical sketches of individuals who were major influences on Dreiser, both as a man and as a writer. The men profiled in Twelve Men are a diverse and colorful group: from Dreiser's equally famous brother, the song-writer Paul Dreiser, to the entirely obscure railroad foreman Michael Burke, on whose work crew Dreiser had labored in 1903.