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Dec 28, 2021 | ISBN 9780593314883
Mar 02, 1999 | ISBN 9780375753213 Buy
Jan 01, 1982 | ISBN 9780553213744 Buy *This format is not eligible to earn points towards the Reader Rewards program
Dec 28, 2021 | ISBN 9780593467329
Oct 30, 2007 | ISBN 9780553904307 Buy
Nov 01, 2000 | ISBN 9780679641384 Buy
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Mar 02, 1999 | ISBN 9780375753213
Jan 01, 1982 | ISBN 9780553213744
Oct 30, 2007 | ISBN 9780553904307
Nov 01, 2000 | ISBN 9780679641384
This landmark novel about a small-town girl who runs away to the big city has been hailed as one of the greatest portraits of urban life in American literature.When Theodore Dreiser’s epic first novel stormed onto the literary scene in 1900, it was a breath of fresh air in more ways than one. Celebrated for the vibrant and gritty realism of its portrayal of city life, Sister Carrie also gave the world an unforgettable heroine—a thoroughly modern young woman who turned the traditional cautionary tale of the fallen woman on its head. When Carrie Meeber runs away to Chicago, she has nothing to rely on but her beauty and a fierce determination to improve her life. She escapes work in a factory by becoming the mistress of first one man and then a more successful one but ultimately leaves them behind for success and fame on the stage in New York. Long hailed as one of the best novels of the twentieth century, Sister Carrie provides a panoramic view of the dynamic and relentless forces that still drive city life and American culture.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time“Theodore Dreiser is a man who, with the passage of time, is bound to loom larger and larger in the awakening aesthetic consciousness of America. Among all of our prose writers he is one of the few men of whom it may be said that he has . . . never been a trickster. If there is a modern movement in American prose writing, a movement toward greater courage and fidelity to life in writing, Theodore Dreiser is the pioneer and the hero of the movement.”–Sherwood AndersonLong before she was seduced by the cautious and ordinary man whose life she would unravel with no malice and only intermittent interest, the young Carrie Meeber was seduced by the promise of the city–its vitality and reckless possibility, the thrill of material luxury, and the spectacle of power and industry. Banned on publication for its questionable morals, Sister Carrie is the great American novel of seduction, a masterpiece of insight into appetite and innocence.“Such a novel as Sister Carrie stands quite outside the brief traffic of the customary stage. It leaves behind an inescapable impression of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. It is not a mere story, not a novel in the customary American meaning of the word; it is at once a psalm of life and a criticism of life. . . . [Dreiser’s] aim is not merely to tell a tale; his aim is to show the vast ebb and flow of forces which sway and condition human destiny. The thing he seeks to do is to stir, to awaken, to move. One does not arise from such a book as Sister Carrie with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.”–H. L. Mencken
“When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” With Sister Carrie, first published in 1900, Theodore Dreiser transformed the conventional “fallen woman” story into a genuinely innovative and powerful work of fiction. As he hurled his impressionable midwestern heroine into the throbbing, amoral world of the big city, he revealed, with brilliant insight, the deep and driving forces of American culture: the restless idealism, glamorous materialism, and basic spiritual innocence.Sister Carrie brought American literature into the twentieth century. This volume, which reprints the text Dreiser approved for publication during his lifetime and includes a special appendix discussing his earlier, unedited manuscript, is the original standard edition of one of the great masterpieces of literary realism.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time“American writing, before and after Dreiser’s time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin,” said H. L. Mencken. Sister Carrie, Dreiser’s great first novel, transformed the conventional “fallen woman” story into a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Naïve young Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of the modern city, becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and then of a saloon manager, who elopes with her to New York. Both its subject matter and Dreiser’s unsparing, nonjudgmental approach made Sister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and the work retains the power to shock readers today.“Sister Carrie came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” noted Sinclair Lewis. “Dreiser enlarged, willy-nilly, by a kind of historical accident if you will, the range of American literature,” observed Robert Penn Warren. “[Sister Carrie] is a vivid and absorbing work of art.”
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time‘American writing, before and after Dreiser’s time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin,’ said H. L. Mencken. Sister Carrie, Dreiser’s great first novel, transformed the conventional ‘fallen woman’ story into a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Naïve young Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of the modern city, becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and then of a saloon manager, who elopes with her to New York. Both its subject matter and Dreiser’s unsparing, nonjudgmental approach made Sister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and the work retains the power to shock readers today. ‘Sister Carrie came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,’ noted Sinclair Lewis. ‘Dreiser enlarged, willy-nilly, by a kind of historical accident if you will, the range of American literature,’ observed Robert Penn Warren. ‘[Sister Carrie] is a vivid and absorbing work of art.’
Theodre Dreiser was born into a large and impoverished German American family in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871. He began his writing career as a reporter, working for newspapers in Chicago. Pittsburg, and St. Louis, until an editor friend, Arthur… More about Theodore Dreiser
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