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

1911 edition or the restored Pennsylvania edition, should be considered the authoritative text and used in scholarship and teaching? These questions, however, are not unique to Jennie Gerhardt. Over the past twenty years a number of great American novels have been published in restored editions, including Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, Richard Wright's Native Son and Black Boy, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel. In other words, the discussion extends itself well beyond Dreiser and Jennie Gerhardt.

The debate over the importance or even the necessity of a restored version of Jennie Gerhardt is intense. Proponents of the restored text contend that the editorial changes so altered the novel as to seriously undermine its artistic merit. West, for instance, argues that what emerged for publication in 1911 “was a considerably different work of art—changed in style, characterization, and theme” (“Historical” 442). Dreiser biographer Richard Lingeman, in his essay “The Biographical Significance of Jennie Gerhardt,” adds that senior Harper editor “[Ripley] Hitchcock and his subeditors tarted up Dreiser's plain style with rewriting that made it closer to what was popular fiction” (13). In the preface to the restored edition, Riggio states that in

In his discussion on textual editing, Philip Cohen argues that although West does not go far enough in his textual reconstruction of Jennie Gerhardt, “[t]wo editions are better than one” (736). Cohen agrees with West's contention that the editorial cuts and emendations transform the novel from a “blunt, carefully documented piece of social analysis to a love story merely set against a social background” (“Historical” 442), and adds that a careful examination of these changes could be instrumental in demonstrating how “a commercial editorial process reinforced