Customer Reviews

Theodore Dreiser : Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men (Library of America)

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These novels of course represent the best in literature, but LOA has left it unclear whether their version of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt are the unexpurgated or heavily edited, tamed-dowm versions, the former recently released by Penguin Books. If not, this volume would be of little interest.

I have enjoyed "Sister Carrie" and "Jennie Gerhardt" very much. The lives led by ordinary and extraordinary people before the turn of century is enlightening and makes for compelling reading. Both novels are well paced and realistic and for me, praise from Sinclair Lewis and H.L. Mencken is enough reason to discover Theodore Dreiser.
I have not read Twelve Men yet but will in the near future.
I also would like to recommend the publisher "The Library of America", a non-profit publisher dedicated to preserving the works of America's greatest writers. These volumes are hardbound with cloth coverings, acid free paper, and ribbon markers, a chronology and notes on the text is usually included. In edition to this book I recently read this publisher's tribute to Dawn Powell, an outstanding book and author.

Theodore Dreiser's works hold up well as storytelling while offering the added advantage of being timepieces.

"Sister Carrie" and "Jennie Gerhardt" are similar tales of young girls whose youthful sexuality aid their flight from poverty.

Carrie and Jennie are sympathetic, nonetheless, because their climbs up the social latter are propelled, not by their own guile, but by that of the wealthy men who would deign to enjoy their youthful bounty.

Both attain fates that are only satisfactory and we will leave it at that so as not to spoil either novel's end point.

Dreiser wrote in a smooth style with more than a touch of density to it. He often erred on the side of expository writing, describing events and also telling you what they meant, rather than hitching them to action.

Nonetheless, the tales can hook you and make for engrossing reading because of the writer's thoroughness and the extreme polish he gave the prose.

The "Twelve Men" portion of the book is lengthy as either novel, without the advantage of narrative continuity, but still offers much. The characters are colorful, but unique mostly as products of a time that has passed and therefore impossible to duplicate or find in contemporary types.

Althought he lived well into the 1940s, these works are essentially post-Civil War works rendered by a younger man of German family reared in Indiana. His America is that of the Industrial Revolution. It is that bygone America where the beehive of industry is clustered along the shores of the Great Lakes.

Its gritty capitals are Chicago, Columbus and Cleveland. Their supporting casts are the smaller towns of his home state, Illinois, and Ohio. Railroads are king and the poor loiter around tracks looking for spare bits of coal that drop from hopper cars to warm their homes.

His New York is the New York of Broadway when Broadway was alone and uncontested by the film business for supremacy in the world of spectacle. It is the New York of the horse-drawn carriage and mule-driven dray, of the great Gilded Age fortunes.

This Library of America collection offers a view of these bygone eras and the people who strove in them through the skilled writing hand and practiced journalist's eye of an American literary stalwart.

Th. Dreiser is a well-known American novelist and I do not have to review this book which I had the pleasure of re-reading after so many years.
Idem as concerns Robert Frost's poems.

The Library of America goes to great lengths to offer the most authoritative editions of the literature they publish. If you browse its website, you'll find much historical information about the texts that are chosen. In the case of Sister Carrie, the first (and unexpurgated) version is used for this volume.

I do not know if this was a 'tamed down' version - probably so, since I didn't see any racy scenes - but even so, a fascinating look at life in those times (early 1900's). Both "Sister Carrie" and "Jennie Gerhardt" are the stories of a girl who was used by men, but survived nevertheless. There's a strong feeling on my part that Dreiser was trying to understand the men in the story far more than the women, despite making the women the title characters. Neither story would be shocking by today's standards, but their sympathetic portrayals of women who allow themselves to be 'kept' must have been a bit startling at the time. The read is slightly 'sludgy', in keeping with literature of the day, but still very enjoyable.