Sister Carrie : One of Modern Library's 100 Best Novels (American Library)

Theodore Dreiser. Edited By Neda M. Westlake, John C. Berkey, Alice M. Winters and James L. W. West III.

ISBN 10: 0140390022 / ISBN 13: 9780140390025

Published by Viking Penguin Group, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1981

About this Item

The unexpurgated edition. Dreiser's unsparing story of a country girl's rise to riches as the mistress of a wealthy man - now fully restored to the authors original version. Differing greatly from the expurgated version published in 1900, Penguin's landmark edition (copublished with the University of Pennsylvania Press) follows Dreiser's original manuscript, restoring for the first time the novel's bleak, dramatically consistent endings, its full characterizations, its profanity and sexual references, and its real place and character names. This edition features an introduction by Alfred Kazin, a selected bibliography, and a note on the text.(We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions etc.).

Seller Inventory # 007375

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sister Carrie : One of Modern Library's 100 Best Novels (American Library)
• Publisher: Viking Penguin Group, New York, NY, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 1981
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140390022
• ISBN 13: 9780140390025
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: Reprint
• Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literature,classics Poetry and Plays

About this title

Synopsis

This edition of Dreiser's novel is the first publication of the entire, unexpurgated, uncensored text. It includes a preface and acknowledgements, the text of the novel, historical/critical commentary and accompanying notes.

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