Thoroughly immersed in the turn-of-the-century art scene, Theodore Dreiser’s autobiographical The Genius explores the multiple conflicts between art and business, art and marriage, and between traditional and modern views of sexual morality. Despite heavy editing before its 1915 publication, The Genius was deemed so shocking that its sale was immediately prohibited by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Eventually released in 1923, the novel confirmed Dreiser’s status as a writer ahead of his time.
Clare Virginia Eby’s new edition brings to print for the first time Dreiser’s original version of the novel as he composed it in 1911. The protagonist Eugene Witla, as well as the women he loves, emerge as very different characters than they appear in the 1915 edition and the ending takes a markedly different turn. Dreiser’s attention to female characters’ inner lives and their passions, sexual and otherwise, also renders them more comprehensible and sympathetic.
Long understood as the most autobiographical of Dreiser’s novels, this new edition suggests a younger, less assertive Dreiser whose mature ideas of self, masculinity, artistic achievement, and worldly success were still in the process of formation.
