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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.