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

chapters. He was certain that he could finish the novel within the year, even though he admits in a letter dated April 16, 1901, that he had already found “an error in character analysis [that] makes me wish to throw aside everything from my fifteenth chapter on and rewrite it…” (New Letters 13). Whittling the forty finished chapters to just fifteen, he reached out to Ainslee magazine's Richard Duffy, and in a letter dated March 19, 1901, asked him to approach the magazine's attorneys “to loan me a hundred dollars for a few weeks—long enough to allow me to finish my new novel” (11). Dreiser sent the unfinished chapters to several publishing firms, including D. Appleton and Company, who did not feel comfortable offering him a contract at that point in the novel's development. Dreiser also offered the partially completed manuscript to John Phillips of the publishing house McClure, Phillips, and Company. Phillips not only rejected it, but, as Dreiser recounts in a 1941 interview: “He told me—he came out into the anteroom and told me—that if I wished to write such stories he supposed that there was no way in which I could be stopped, but he asked me not to come to him to discuss my writing” (qtd. in van Gelder 309). Dreiser then sent the chapters he had finished to editor Rutger P. Jewett, who had been impressed with Sister Carrie and wanted to see his firm, J. F. Taylor and Company, adopt Dreiser as one of its principal authors. After reading the unfinished manuscript Taylor offered Dreiser a contract. The company would pay Dreiser a monthly advance of $100.00 in order to accommodate a full-time writing schedule that would enable him to finish Jennie. Upon completion not only would they publish it, but also they would reissue Carrie. Taylor's financial offer gave Dreiser the confidence he needed to finish Jennie. In a letter dated November 25, 1901, to Joseph Taylor he wrote that he was “straining every nerve—bending every energy to give this new theme its unity, simplicity of progression and force. All my mind is colored by this problem” (Letters I 68). He sent the chapters he had completed to Mary Fanton Annabel Roberts, who agreed to edit the manuscript for him. Dreiser asked her to “pull” the finished chapters “together close—everything can go except the grip” (qtd. in Lingeman, Theodore 183).