The "Genius" (Annotated)

The "Genius" traces the rise, dispersion, and moral bewilderment of Eugene Witla, a gifted painter whose artistic hunger is inseparable from erotic appetite, social ambition, and commercial compromise. Dreiser's expansive naturalist method—documentary in detail, psychologically insistent, and often deliberately ungainly—places the artist novel within the modern realities of advertising, urban capi...