Theodore Dreiser's "Nigger Jeff": The Development of an Aesthetic

Abstract

T HANKS TO THE WORK of Robert H. Elias and W. A. Swanberg, we are beginning to have an adequate sense of Dreiser's life. But many aspects of Dreiser the artist remain relatively obscure or unexplored-in particular his aesthetic beliefs and fictional techniques at various stages of his career. An excellent opportunity to study Dreiser's developing aesthetic lies in the existence of versions of his short story Nigger Jeff. The extant versions of this story reveal with considerable clarity and force Dreiser's changing beliefs concerning the nature of fiction. Dreiser's first attempt to write story about the lynching of Missouri Negro is preserved in an unpublished University of Virginia manuscript called A Victim of Justice.' Although A Victim of Justice is clearly work of the I890's, it is difficult to date its composition precisely. The narrator of the story begins by noting that he has recently spent a day in one of Missouri's pleasant villages. While visiting Potter's Field, he recalls rural Missouri lynching that he had witnessed several years since. This opening situation is the product of number of events of the mid-i89o's. Dreiser was reporter on the St. Louis Republic in the fall of I893, and it was during this period that he observed the lynching on which the story is based.2 In addition, on July 23, I894, Dreiser