Sister Carrie (Modern Library Classics) [Paperback]

Theodore Dreiser (Author), Andrew Delbanco (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Modern Library Classics | Publication Date: March 2, 1999

"        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 Anderson

Long 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

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, was published in 1900--sort of. The story of Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman, was strong stuff at the turn of the century, and what Dreiser's wary publisher released was a highly expurgated version. Times change, and we now have a restored "author's cut" of Sister Carrie that shows how truly ahead of his time Dreiser was. First and foremost, he has written an astute, nonmoralizing account of a woman and her limited options in late-19th-century America. That's impressive in and of itself, but Dreiser doesn't stop there. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, he gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing.

Dreiser's story unfolds in the measured cadences of an earlier era. This sometimes works brilliantly as we follow the choices, small and large, that lead some characters to doom and others to glory. On the other hand, the middle chapters--of which there are many--do drag somewhat, even when one appreciates Dreiser's intentions. If you can make it through the sagging midsection, however, you'll be rewarded by Sister Carrie's last 150 pages, which depict the harrowing downward spiral of one of the book's central characters. Here Dreiser portrays with brutal power how the wrong decision--or lack of decision--can lay waste to a life. --Rebecca Gleason

Review

First novel by Theodore Dreiser, published in 1900, but suppressed until 1912. Sister Carrie tells the story of a rudderless but pretty small-town girl who comes to the big city filled with vague ambitions. She is used by men and uses them in turn to become a successful Broadway actress, while George Hurstwood, the married man who has run away with her, loses his grip on life and descends into beggary and suicide. Sister Carrie was the first masterpiece of the American naturalistic movement in its grittily factual presentation of the vagaries of urban life and in its ingenuous heroine, who goes unpunished for her transgressions against conventional sexual morality. The book's strengths include a brooding but compassionate view of humanity, a memorable cast of characters, and a compelling narrative line. The emotional disintegration of Hurstwood is a much-praised triumph of psychological analysis. Sister Carrie is a work of pivotal importance in American literature, and it became a model for subsequent American writers of realism. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 752 pages
• Publisher: Modern Library (March 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375753214
• ISBN-13: 978-0375753213
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (131 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #462,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Possibly the greatest novel in American literature, April 20, 2000

By 

"elljay" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sister Carrie (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

Somewhere in the depths of time a critic once labeled playwright Eugene O'Neill a genius with no talent. It's a description that could just as easily fit Theodore Dreiser, an uneducated, mercurial man who, while still in his twenties, and with virtually no experience composing fiction, managed to crank out what I consider one of the greatest novels in American literature. Very few authors have ever managed to generate the raw power that Dreiser does over the 500 or so pages of "Sister Carrie." It is amazing how much of the human experience he has put into this book, how well he understands the hopes, fears, and desires--mysterious and contradictory as they often are--that drive ordinary people.

The conventional judgment on Dreiser puts him in the naturalistic, social-realist tradition of Zola and Hardy. There is much in this; but I think his real strength lies in depicting character--Carrie, Hurstwood, and Drouet really come alive in these pages. His characters possess a depth and complexity of feeling that one rarely finds in fiction. Dreiser has a melancholy, fatalistic sense that the world may be too vast and impersonal for people to live in it comfortably, and yet his world is vibrantly human as well.

I personally find Carrie a more likable heroine (if you could call her that) than many readers have. She is self-absorbed, yes, but also capable of compassion for others, and she is never intentionally cruel. Like all of Dreiser's characters she is somewhere between the angels and the devils.

This is by no means a perfect book. Dreiser's rhetorical flourishes can become absolutely ridiculous, and so can his habit of injecting philosophical commentary into the texture of the narrative. But the total effect of "Sister Carrie" is powerful, and more than compensates for any defects in the novel.

67 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Heights of Naturalism, June 9, 2003

By 

Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sister Carrie (Modern Library) (Hardcover)

It is no mystery why Frank Norris praised to high heaven Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel "Sister Carrie." Norris, one of America's great naturalist writers, saw in Dreiser's tale about a young woman on the make a reflection of the same bleak vistas he wrote about in "Vandover and the Brute," "The Octopus," and "McTeague." When Dreiser submitted his book for publication, it was Norris who read the book and made a glowing recommendation to the publisher. There were immense problems with "Sister Carrie" from that point forward: the wife of the publisher hated the story and worked hard behind the scenes to prevent its release. With a contract already signed, Dreiser's book did become a reality but the publishing house refused to support it with any marketing. The story languished for years in a paper limbo before finally emerging to great success and acclaim. Thank goodness it did because this may be one of the most powerful books ever written about social climbing and the perils of bad morals. Dreiser went on to publish more novels (American Tragedy, The Financier) before dropping out of the literary scene and converting to communism before his death in 1945.

"Sister Carrie" doesn't promise much at the beginning. In fact, this is yet another story about a rural person arriving in the big city seeking fame and fortune. In this case, it is Carrie Meeber, a young woman moving to Chicago to live with her sister and her husband while she tries to find work. Carrie quickly discovers big city life is tough; her sister's home life bores her to death, the work she finds in a shoe factory is pure drudgery, and she doesn't have enough money to buy decent clothes because she has to pay her sister four dollars a week for rent. Carrie hates her base co-workers and spends most of her free time watching people pass on the street outside of her sister's apartment. When Carrie loses her job after an illness, it looks like she will have to return home to Columbia City and forget about her dreams in Chicago.

Enter George Drouet, a semi-successful salesman with a voracious appetite for the ladies. George finagled Carrie's address when he met her on the train into Chicago, and now the two meet again by chance. The results of this meeting shape the rest of the book. Carrie abandons her sister's lodgings and becomes "kept" by George. It is during this period that Carrie meets George Hurstwood, the wealthy manager of a fancy Chicago tavern and friend of Drouet. Through a series of misunderstandings about the marriage status of Carrie and Hurstwood, and serious lapses in moral judgments, Hurstwood and Carrie move on to bigger and better things in New York City.

It is at this point that Norris must have began enthusing, for Dreiser embarks on a harrowing tour through the destruction of a human being's body and soul. Just when you think a person could sink no lower, Dreiser yanks you back to reality and illustrates for you just how bad things can get before the inevitable occurs. When the author contrasts the utter humiliation of one character with the elevation in status of another, the tension becomes too much to bear. This novel is painful to read, but at the same time it is so riveting it is nearly impossible to put it down. We've all seen or known people who suffered the fates revealed in this story, or at least I have, and that makes it even more chillingly realistic. How Dreiser managed to capture the feel of his characters' lives is a mystery, but that is what makes this book great literature; it is timeless in its examination of the inner workings of the human soul.

"Sister Carrie" is classic literature, but that does not mean there are not problems with the story. Dreiser's prose takes some getting used to before it starts to flow. In fact, this may be the best book I have ever read where the prose is often mediocre. I told one person that the author's style reminded me of an intoxicated welder, and I still believe that to be the case for most of the book. Dreiser has a tendency to jam his sentences together into an unwieldy mix of clauses and commas. After a few hundred pages this hardly seems to matter but it could provide a reason for someone just starting the book to quit reading it. Do not quit, however, because the story ends up being so good that the stylistic problems quickly fade into insignificance.

Another difficulty involves the middle portion of the story, when Carrie, Drouet, and Hurstwood vie for position with each other. These chapters appreciably drag while providing no clues about the goldmine that soon follows. Looking at the story as a whole, I understand now why these chapters were necessary but I didn't while I was reading them. Again, do not give up too soon lest you miss out on the extraordinary buildup to the soul shattering conclusion.

Ultimately, the messages conveyed by Dreiser outweigh the dual problems of prose and a few plodding chapters. The scandalous behavior the author wrote about angered many during his time because people believed that divorce, infidelity, loose morals, and social positioning were things better talked about privately than brought out in the open. The fact that Dreiser wrote such things without delivering a blistering rebuke about such behaviors also stunned society. Perhaps it is not too far off to say that Theodore Dreiser was the Jerry Springer of his generation, merely revealing things that everyone knew happened behind closed doors. Whatever the case may be, "Sister Carrie" is sheer brilliance. I was so fired up after reading this book that I went right out and got "American Tragedy." I now understand why Frank Norris went into paroxysms of delight about Dreiser's book.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pay the extra $2.50 for a publisher's edition, April 22, 2008

By 

B. Kerr (Pelham, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sister Carrie (Kindle Edition)

This edition, which was prepared by volunteers, contains numerous errors, dropped words and punctuations, misspellings, wrong tenses, etc. It was so annoying to read that I purchased the Modern Library edition ($3.50) after about 75 pages. The errors are not occasional; they're on virtually every page. Although it's much less expensive, the savings aren't worth it.