The Trouble with Dreiser: Harper and the Editing of Jennie Gerhar ...

recently, Hakutani's Theodore Dreiser: Art, Music, and Literature 1897–1902 (2007) and Pizer's Theodore Dreiser: A Picture and a Criticism of Life: New Letters (2008). This new era of Dreiser studies was aided and enhanced by the massive collection of letters, diaries, and manuscripts donated to the University of Pennsylvania by the Dreiser estate in the early 1960s. This material has provided scholars with the much needed biographical information necessary to place Dreiser and his work within a larger framework. Additionally, memoirs and correspondences written and/or collated by personal friends and lovers provide more intimate detail for Dreiser scholarship and biography.

Perhaps one of the most interesting debates taking place in Dreiser scholarship is the assessment of the University of Pennsylvania's restored edition of Jennie Gerhardt, first published by Harper and Brothers in 1911. At the time of its first publication, both Dreiser and his longtime friend H. L. Mencken thought Jennie Gerhardt to be better than Sister Carrie. However, critics were divided as to its literary value. In turn, the public was hesitant to invest time and money in a novel that met with such skeptical reviews. Overall sales were barely mediocre, and by 1912 Jennie Gerhardt had disappeared from public view. Even with the enormous success and critical recognition of An American Tragedy and, eventually, of Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt remained largely unrecognized by the critical community.

Only in the last fifteen years have critics begun to reconsider the novel's place in the Dreiser canon. Although the critical material on Jennie Gerhardt is still minuscule in comparison to material on his other, more widely read novels, the interest has sparked a new discussion among Dreiser scholars. The novel's renaissance can be attributed in part to the 1992 publication of the University of Pennsylvania Press' edition of Jennie Gerhardt, commonly referred to as the Pennsylvania edition. This edition restores the thousands of cuts and emendations made to the text by the editors at Harper and Brothers prior to its publication in 1911. The questions now facing the academic community are: (1) how much damage, if any, did these changes do to Dreiser's original story, and, depending on the effect of these changes, (2) which text, the Harper