Jennie Gerhardt is a destitute young woman. While working in a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, Jennie meets George Brander, a United State Senator, who becomes infatuated with her. He helps her family and declares his wish to marry her. Jennie, grateful for his benevolence, agrees to sleep with him. He dies before they marry, and Jennie is pregnant. She gives birth to a daughter, Vesta, and moves to Cleveland with her mother. There she meets Lester Kane, a prosperous manufacturer's son, and their love must contend with continual dissaproval from his family.

This book establishes the restored version of Jennie Gerhardt as a far better piece of literature than the 1911 edition. It is also the first extensive study of the damaging effects of the editorial process on a significant work of American literature. This study carefully compares the restored edition to the 1911 edition, revealing clear and precise patterns to the Harper editing. These patterns, in turn, suggest that the Harper editors deliberately approached Dreiser's original manuscript with the intention of softening its social and moral content. This study argues that the firm's historical emphasis on family values and its lengthy bout with bankruptcy and reorganization, coupled with the conservative social and moral climate at the turn of the century, motivated the house to edit the novel with a heavy and censorious hand. The end result was a more agreeable and, therefore, more saleable book. This study also provides an extensive discussion on the probable reasons why Dreiser acquiesced to changes he felt were not in the best interest of his novel. By continually placing material from the 1911 edition alongside that of the restored edition and then situating the cuts and emendations within their appropriate thematic, historical, cultural, social, moral, biographical, and autobiographical contexts, readers will see how the editors distorted Dreiser's original writing of every major character, their interaction with their environment, and their relationship with others. Readers will also see how the editing blunted, and in some cases completely erased, Dreiser's criticism of the wealthy capitalist; society's understanding and treatment of the poor, the working class, and the immigrant; and traditional notions of motherhood, womanhood, relationships, and the American Dream. This study argues that once Dreiser's original language is restored, Jennie Gerhardt can stand alongside Dreiser's other novels and can add to critical discussions on class, gender, morality, ethnicity, naturalism, and romanticism in Dreiser's fiction. The Trouble with Dreiser: Harper and the Editing of Jennie Gerhardt is an important work for collections of American literature, Theodore Dreiser, textual studies, early twentieth-century cultural studies (especially those interested in ethnicity), and early twentieth-century historical studies.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Jennie Gerhardt" (A Novel) by Theodore Dreiser. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Jennie Gerhardt (1911) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. Controversial for its honest depiction of work, desire, and urban life, Jennie Gerhardt has endured as a classic of naturalist fiction and remains a powerful example of social critique over a century after its publication. Originally titled The Transgressor, the novel was shelved by Dreiser following a nervous breakdown in 1903. Controversial upon publication, Jennie Gerhardt has been largely overshadowed by Dreiser’s other works, but undoubtedly deserves renewed attention from readers and critics alike. In Columbus, Ohio, Jennie Gerhardt struggles to make ends meet while working at a popular hotel. There, she encounters a United States Senator, who takes a liking to her and offers his help with finances. Wary at first, Jennie acquiesces, and soon grows to care for the older man. She becomes pregnant and Senator Brander promises to marry her, but an outbreak of typhoid claims him as one of its victims. Left to raise a daughter on her own, Jennie moves to Cleveland to look for work. Employed as a lady’s maid, she soon meets the son of a wealthy industrialist who seems to have her best interests in mind. In order to stay with him, however, she hides her daughter by leaving her with her mother, and joins Lester on a trip to New York. Jennie Gerhardt is a story of tragedy and hope, of one woman determined to get more out of life than was promised to her at birth. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time 'American writing, before and after Dreiser's time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin,' said H. L. Mencken. Sister Carrie, Dreiser's great first novel, transformed the conventional 'fallen woman' story into a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Naïve young Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of the modern city, becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and then of a saloon manager, who elopes with her to New York. Both its subject matter and Dreiser's unsparing, nonjudgmental approach made Sister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and the work retains the power to shock readers today. 'Sister Carrie came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,' noted Sinclair Lewis. 'Dreiser enlarged, willy-nilly, by a kind of historical accident if you will, the range of American literature,' observed Robert Penn Warren. '[Sister Carrie] is a vivid and absorbing work of art.'

"In 1919, having recently accepted the publishing contract of a new publisher, Dreiser proposed to publish a "book of characters" that would collect twelve biographical sketches of individuals who were major influences on Dreiser, both as a man and as a writer. The resulting narratives combine the best attributes of the character sketch, the autobiography, and the short story into miniature masterpieces of prose. The men profiled in Twelve Men are a diverse and colorful group: from Dreiser's equally famous brother, the song-writer Paul Dreiser's ("My Brother Paul"), to the entirely obscure railroad foreman Michael Burke ("The Mighty Rourke"), on whose work crew Dreiser had labored in 1903. The twelve narratives are compelling portraits of the men portrayed, but they also reveal many insights into Dreiser's own life and work."--Goodreads website.