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

blend of “subtlety” and “finesse” (Pizer, Dowell, and Rusch 93). Most important in current Dreiser studies, however, is the way in which scholars have been able to reclaim his work as a truthful mirror of American life, both now and in the past. Gogol says that Dreiser, unlike Henry James, was willing to “get his hands dirty.” Dreiser “shows us the external forces that shape his characters' lives and [therefore] provides some of the first authentic portrayals of working-class people” (“Intro” viii). As a result, Gogol argues, Dreiser's canon can be seen as “a repository for the era's literary and cultural developments” (x).

In addition to the emphasis on Dreiser's naturalism, his rhetorical style, his depiction of American life, and his biography, other critical issues have emerged. During the 1980s, for instance, there was an effort to place Dreiser within the scope of Marxist and new historical notions of “capitalist values” (Pizer, Dowell, and Rusch 93), and, even though Gogol asserts that not enough women have written on Dreiser or about Dreiser's women, a “handful of women scholars” have sparked an interesting discussion on Dreiser's treatment of women (xi). Also of interest are essays dealing with Dreiser's attitude toward issues of ethnicity and class, such as Arthur D. Casciato's essay “How German is Jennie Gerhardt?” Much of the more recent discussions have been facilitated by the International Dreiser Society, which, until 2006, published Dreiser Studies. The journal has since merged with Studies in American Naturalism, but Dreiser continues to remain a focus of discussion even within this larger literary context.

For the most part, the emphasis in critical studies has always centered on Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, ² but recently an increasing amount of work has been published on Dreiser's minor novels, such as Jennie Gerhardt and The Bulwark. Collections and editions of Dreiser's unpublished works have also emerged, such as James L. W. West III's An Amateur Laborer (1983); Yoshinobu Hakutani's Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser (1985); Keith Newlin and Frederic E. Rusch's The Collected Plays of Theodore Dreiser (2000); Theodore Dreiser's Uncollected Magazine Articles (2003), also by Hakutani; Theodore Dreiser: Interviews (2004), edited by Rusch and Donald Pizer; and most