THEODORE DREISER was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on August 27, 1871. After an impoverished childhood, he became a reporter and feature writer for newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Buffalo. He moved to New York in 1897 and made a start there as a successful magazine journalist and editor. In 1900 he published his first novel, Sister Carrie, but the book was considered immoral by its own publisher and was given little promotion or sales support. Dreiser entered a period of depression in 1901, emerging two years later to resume his career as a magazine editor; but he published no new fiction until Jennie Gerhardt in 1911. There followed a decade and a half of major work in several literary forms, capped in 1925 by An American Tragedy, a novel that brought him great critical acclaim and professional reward. Dreiser was preoccupied by philosophical and political issues during the last two decades of his life; he died in Los Angeles on December 28, 1945.
JAMES L. W. WEST III is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He has been awarded fellowships by the Guggeheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has held Fulbright appointments in England and Belgium. West’s American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900, an expansion of his 1983 Rosenbach Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1988. His most recent books are William Styron: A Life (1998) and The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King (2005).
Frontispiece from the original 1911 Harper Bros. edition of Jennie Gerhardt.
Jennie Gerhardt
Theodore Dreiser
Edited by James L. W. West III
Originally published 1911 by Harper Bros.
First unexpurgated edition published 1992 by University of Pennsylvania Press
First Pine Street Books edition published 2006
Copyright © 1992 University of Pennsylvania Press
Introduction and notes copyright 1994 James L. W. West III
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Pine Street Books is an imprint of
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-1955-5
ISBN-10: 0-8122-1955-4
CONTENTS
Suggestions for Further Reading
INTRODUCTION
When Theodore Dreiser began composing Jennie Gerhardt on January 6, 1901, he could not have known that it would be more than ten years before the narrative would see print. His first novel, Sister Carrie, had been published by Doubleday, Page & Co. two months earlier, and he still had high hopes for its success. Dreiser had run into difficulties over Sister Carrie with his publisher, Frank Doubleday, but friends were still praising the book and assuring him that it would sell once the public discovered it. Doubleday had called Sister Carrie immoral and had tried to renege on his commitment to publish it, but Dreiser had dug in his heels and insisted that the book be issued. Now, in January, Dreiser was anxious to produce a second novel that would be at least as good as Sister Carrie—perhaps even better.
He took the material for this new narrative from the life of one of his own sisters—Mary Frances Dreiser, or “Mame,” as she was known within the family. As a teenager in Terre Haute, Indiana, Mame had become involved with an older man, a lawyer who is called “Colonel Silsby” in Dreiser’s autobiographical volume Dawn. This man gave Mame money and gifts while visiting her at the Dreiser home against the wishes of the father, John Paul Dreiser, who would serve as the model for William Gerhardt in this new novel. Mame had turned up pregnant—perhaps by Colonel Silsby, though she could not be sure. She had given birth to a stillborn infant in the Dreiser home; her mother had buried the child’s body in the back yard.
A few years later Mame met a man named Austin Brennan, a bluff, good-natured business executive from a well-to-do Irish family in Rochester, New York. Mame and Brennan set up housekeeping and stayed together until his death many years later. They claimed to be married, though no one knew whether this was actually true. Brennan’s family was scandalized and never accepted Mame, causing a permanent breach between Brennan and his brothers and sisters. Mame’s relationship with her father, however, was repaired during these years. He had been furious when she had been “ruined” as a teenager, but she had not wavered in her devotion to him. She and Brennan nursed him when he was old and ill, and he came to be at peace with her and to admire her innate decency. He died in her home in Rochester on December 24, 1900, thirteen days before his son Theodore began writing Jennie Gerhardt. John Paul Dreiser must have been much on his son’s mind as he began to compose this new novel.
In Jennie Gerhardt (initially called “The Transgressor”), Dreiser tapped deeply into his own family and ethnic background. Almost all of the major and minor characters are versions of Dreiser family members or of people Dreiser had known. Jennie and Lester are modeled after Mame and Brennan; Jennie’s mother and father are portraits of Dreiser’s parents; Senator Brander is an idealized version of Colonel Silsby; Bass and the Gerhardt children are Dreiser’s renderings of his older brother, Paul, and of the other Dreiser children. The novel is set in cities that Dreiser knew well, either from childhood or from his days as a newspaper reporter: Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus. And the Gerhardt home is the one in which he grew up during the 1870s and 1880s.
In Jennie Gerhardt Dreiser was recalling his upbringing as a member of a German ethnic minority. Dreiser’s father was an immigrant from Mayen, a town in the Alsace-Lorraine region, and his mother was a Mennonite of German ancestry. The Dreisers, like the Gerhardts, were part of the German laboring element—a group in turn-of-the-century America that had not yet been brought fully into the larger society. German Catholics like the Dreisers (or Lutherans, like the Gerhardts) had a distinct culture marked by German language, food, and drink, as well as by strict social practices imported from the homeland. Dreiser’s father, like Gerhardt père, read a German-language newspaper and spoke with a heavy accent.
