I promptly downloaded
Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, and The Titan to my Kindle.
Whaley (English, East Texas Baptist University) compares the original 1911 edition of Dreiser's
Jennie Gerhardt with a 1995 edition created from the author's manuscript version.
The essays in Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism focus primarily on Dreiser's two best-known and most important novels, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, and to a lesser degree on
Jennie Gerhardt and The "Genius." (There are only scattered references to the Cowperwood trilogy.) Virtually all of them have something at least interesting to say about these texts, though inevitably some contain more genuine substance than the others.
In 1911 Dreiser's second novel,
Jennie Gerhardt, was published, followed by the first two volumes of a projected trilogy of novels, based on the life of the American transportation magnate Charles T.
THEODORE DREISER began
Jennie Gerhardt in 1901 but published his novel, after a protracted series of intermissions and editorial revisions, in the autumn of 1911.
As for literary judgements not necessarily sustained by time, he viewed Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night as "poor stuff indeed." In Smart Set, he actually wrote that Dreiser's
Jennie Gerhardt was "the best American novel I have ever read"--adducing only as an afterthought "the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn."
Among books published this year was the novel
Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser, which sold well enough to warrant republication in 1912 of Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie (1900).
Encouraged by Paul and a few discriminating critics, Dreiser published <IR>
JENNIE GERHARDT </IR> in 1911.
Another is the impetus to read Dreiser's powerful
Jennie Gerhardt (Schocken, $8.95), which had somehow eluded me through years of American lit classes.
The novel, followed by
Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and An American Tragedy (1925), among others, irrevocably altered the path of American literature by portraying characters who follow their basest instincts in search of elusive happiness and material success.