SOURCE: "Theodore Dreiser's 'Nigger Jeff': The Development of an Aesthetic," in American Literature, Vol. XLI, No. 3, November, 1969, pp. 331-41.

In the following essay, Pizer examines three versions of "Nigger Jeff" to illustrate how Dreiser's artistic emphasis in his writing moved from sentimentality toward moral polemics.

Thanks 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 several 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 a story about the lynching of a Missouri...