The Genius

The "Genius" stands as the most directly personal of Theodore Dreiser's novels - and, to the original audience which recoiled from its unprecedented sexual candor, the most shocking. Its story traces the career of Eugene Witla, a talented young artist from a small town in the Midwest. Seeking fulfillment in art and life, he comes first to Chicago and then to New York. As the fiercely driven Eugene gains recognition...enters the world of advertising and mass circulation magazines... moves from woman to woman... the reader comes to view artistic expression, sexual desire and material ambition as but different manifestations of a single central human force.