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. Six essays and one play had already been published in newspapers prior to this collection. 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 Plays of the Natural and Supernatural and ended with Notes on Life, published posthumously in 1974. The collection was castigated by reviewers from the New York Evening Post, the Chicago News and The New Republic, though Dreiser held... it in high regard. Carl Van Doren pointed out Dreiser's inability to sustain his arguments. H.L. Mencken lampooned it. The book draws upon Jacques Loeb's The Mechanistic Conception of Life .
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