The "Genius"

The "Genius" (1915) is the novel Dreiser considered his most satisfactory, and it is strongly autobiographical. The protagonist, Eugene Witla, comes from a small Midwestern town and is full of dreams as a youth. He first works at a local newspaper, then goes to Chicago to study painting, and later ventures to New York. With keen sensibility and artistic talent he rises to fame, marries his beloved Angela, and settles into a respectable life. Yet after achieving fame, the constraints of marriage, the temptations of city life, and the erosion of commercial taste gradually change him: he abandons honest depiction of life and instead caters to the market, producing vulgar commercial paintings and illustrations, gaining wealth and fame while his soul decays. In a spiritual crisis he briefly takes manual labor on the railway, then turns to editing and regains renown; but when he falls in love with a young woman, his wife Angela dies in childbirth, scandal spreads, and he is finally disgraced and mentally broken, his so-called "genius" cut short. Through Eugene's arc from rise to fall, the novel reveals the reality of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American society, which turned art into a commodity and measured everything by money, and asks how an artist should handle the conflict between personal sensitivity, desire, and social norms. After publication the book was prosecuted in the United States for "obscenity," prompting support from the literary world, and it became an important turning point in Dreiser's career. This edition is the second title in the World Classics Translation Library · Dreiser Collection, using the translation by Zhu Wan and Xihai.