Lynching the Black Male Body in Theodore Dreiser’s “****** Jeff”: Did He “Get it all in”?
Patricia D. Hopkins , Roark Mulligan
American Literary Realism
University of Illinois Press
Volume 45, Number 3, Spring 2013
pp. 229-247  

A race without a country, a people without a national ideal. We laugh at their humor. We build up fiction out of their quaint wisdom. We hang and burn them when they interfere with our women. —Theodore Dreiser

In January 1894, as a journalist for the St. Louis Republic, Theodore Dreiser witnessed and reported the lynching of John Buckner in Valley Park, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. A year or two later, he wrote a fictional narrative based on the Buckner case. This story titled “A Victim of Justice” may have been the author’s earliest attempt at fiction, but it was never published. In 1899, encouraged by his friend Arthur Henry, Dreiser wrote four short stories that were published, and one of these was another retelling of the Buckner lynching titled “****** Jeff.” The story first appeared in Ainslee’s magazine (1901). Then in 1918 Dreiser significantly revised “****** Jeff” for publication in his collection Free and Other Stories. In other words, including two 1894 articles for the St. Louis Republic, Dreiser over a twenty-four-year period when lynching was a national epidemic wrote five accounts based on the Buckner case, yet these narratives, their similarities and differences, have never been fully analyzed. Many factors have contributed to this neglect. First, the 1918 short story “****** Jeff” is the only version readily available to scholars, and it is seldom republished because the title has proven an embarrassment, preventing editors from anthologizing the work. Second, until recently critics have mistakenly assumed that the narratives were based on an unknown lynching or on the Red Hill, Missouri, lynching of William Jackson, a case that differed so drastically from Dreiser’s short stories that a comparison was meaningless. Without knowing the lynching on which the stories were based and without examining the various versions, both non-fiction and fiction over a twenty-four year period, a full analysis of the narrative’s cultural significance is impossible. Further, without knowing what Dreiser decided to leave in or leave out of each version, we have no way of evaluating whether or not Dreiser lived up to his incipient artist’s maxim in the 1918 version: “I’ll get it all in!”