One may contend that "Replenishing Jessica" is neither a novel nor an essay, but one cannot deny it is prose. After all, a poet wrote it and he put into is such a phrase as, "He wrapped his dreams in a sigh," which is good even if it does not belong in this novel..." So wrote a critic contemporary of Maxwell Bodenheim in December 1925. Shortly afterwards, the novel was yanked from bookshelves and repressed for reasons of obscenity. It would be almost four years later that Replenishing Jessica would finally be cleared of its charges by a New York judge and available for sale. A new edition was published by Boni & Liveright and sold in excess of 10,000 copies mere days after its revival. Success had landed on Bodenheim's doorstep, but would only last a short while before he was once again at the cusp of personal and financial failure. Replenishing Jessica fell out of print in the early 1950s and has since been forgotten in the annals of Depression-era American literature. Though Bodenheim wrote the novel with its suggestive title in order to turn a quick buck, he managed to also instill into the book a magical realism accurately capturing the sights and sound of Jazz Age New York. Now reprinted for the first time in over 70 years, Bodenheim scholar, Paul Maher Jr., has researched and edited a new edition of Replenishing Jessica for the 21st-century complete with an extensive introduction tracing the history of the book and a biography of Bodenheim between 1925 to 1928.

Maxwell Bodenheim's 1934 novel Slow Vision depicts a young couple, a pair of average Americans swept up in labor struggles and reduced to painful subsistence, portraying the protagonists' gradual understanding of labor unions and the psychological, philosophical, and political trials that led to sympathetic affiliations in Socialism and Communism. Thus initiates their "slow vision," a simmering understanding of the manifestations of Leftist movements and of special relevance to the climate of the first two decades of the 21st century. Bodenheim's books-thirteen novels and nine volumes of verse-are mostly out of print. Some were resurrected in the late-1940s through the mid-1950s as cheap pulp paperbacks after Bodenheim had lost the rights to his own work. Slow Vision was not one of them. Presumably, nobody wanted to be reminded of the Great Depression. Slow Vision would be Bodenheim's last published novel and literary history has forgotten it.