The Editing of American Literature, 1890–1930: Essays and Reviews by Donald Pizer (review)

In 1994, having just finished graduate school, I attended my first American Literature Association conference, surprised to find Dreiserians hotly debating what seemed to me an arcane topic: textual editing. With both the first edition and the new Pennsylvania edition of Sister Carrie available in paperback, the discussion focused on two practical questions: which version should be used in classrooms, and do readers know the works differ dramatically? Six years later, at the centennial celebration of Sister Carrie, textual editing was again the provocative question at issue: Donald Pizer and James L. W. West debated the subject in a room filled beyond capacity—other concurrent sessions ended early to hear this theoretical disputation. That the subject of scholarly editing could fuel such passionate deliberations and that individuals argued heatedly over which version of Sister Carrie should be read by the general public would have thrilled Dreiser—after all, he was the first to promote the novel as a work brought forth in controversy.

In The Editing of American Literature, 1890–1930, Donald Pizer gathers together his previously published textual essays and reviews, reconstructing the theoretical principles and practical history that informed not only the Sister Carrie controversy but also the editing of other modern American writers. Although the essays and reviews have appeared elsewhere, they have never been collected, and in bringing them together, Pizer gives us an overview of textual editing during a time of radical transformation, revealing his central role in this debate. In a brief preface and from a comfortable distance, Pizer sets the scene, recounting the caustic exchanges of the 1960s and 1970s, invoking a humorous adage: “the smaller the stakes the hotter the argument.” But, as Pizer suggests by publishing this collection, the stakes were significant, and these scholarly conversations continue to influence both our editing practices and our awareness of books as culturally constructed texts.

Divided into four sections: “General Essays,” “Theodore Dreiser,” “Stephen Crane,” and “The Text and Practical Criticism,” the work begins with two articles that represent and question what had been standard editing practices, practices approved by the mla through the Center for Editions of American Authors. These guidelines encouraged editors to select, as copy-text, the earliest version of a work, the one supposedly closest to the author’s original intentions (usually the holographic manuscript), then to fill in, correct, and revise using subsequent versions, thus creating an “eclectic,” “authoritative,” or “standard” text. In questioning these principles as first codified by W. W. Greg then advanced by G. Thomas Tanselle, Pizer argues against a single editorial method that assumes a scientific accuracy or a moral absolutism, suggesting that this approach might be applicable to Renaissance texts but not to modern American ones. In the second essay of the collection, “Self-Censorship and Textual Editing,” Pizer further questions the authority of eclectic texts, and to illustrate his point, he examines works by Dreiser, Crane, and Norris, demonstrating that scholars can sometimes reasonably assume an author’s intentions but other times only guess, especially when the composing process was complex. To determine whether or not a restored version of a novel is warranted, Pizer presents a heuristic, four questions that should be asked before editing begins: Is there external evidence (letters, notes on manuscripts) that the author’s wishes were violated? What were the author’s motives in making changes? Is the restored work better than the previously published work? And is the restored version one that should be available to general readers? As he clearly demonstrates, the answers to these questions vary depending on the work, which argues for a flexible methodology, one based on individual circumstances.

In the second section of this collection, Pizer first describes Dreiser’s complex compositional process. Dreiser wrote a first draft by hand quickly—editing as he worked, and then a typescript was prepared and revised radically, often to the point that a second typescript was prepared and revised. In...