Jennie Gerhardt (The University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition)

"His narrative goes forward steadily from beginning to end. Episodes there are, of course, but they keep their proper place, their proper bulk. It is always Jennie that holds the attention; it is Jennie's soul that every scene is ultimately played out....A moral tale? Not at all. It has no more moral than a string quartet or the first book of Euclid. But a philosophy of life is in it, and that philosophy is the same profound pessimism which gave a dark color to the best we have from Conrad, Hardy, Moore, Zola and the Russians--the pessimism of disillusion--not the jejeune, Byronic thing, not the green sickness of youth, but that pessimism that comes with the discovery that the riddle of life, despite all the fine solutions offered by the learned doctors, is essentially insoluble.Theodore Dreiser is the author of 'Jennie Gerhardt (The University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition)', published 1992 under ISBN 9780812212846 and ISBN 0812212843.