Synopsis
This novel about the effects of America's repressive moral climate was controversial in its day, and its availability to the public was delayed 12 years because of the "immorality" in Dreiser's sordid, realistic portrayal of the downfall of an innocent young woman who leaves her country town for the big city.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1991-03-01 | | Series: | World's Classics Series | | Editor: | Lee Clark Mitchell |
| Size | | Height: | 7.3 in | | Width: | 4.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 8.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
Young Carrie Meeber leaves home for the first time and experiences work, love, and the pleasures and responsibilities of independence in late-nineteenth-century Chicago and New York.
Industry Reviews
"No other story I know of gets closer to that blind, hopeful, unyielding struggle, that incessant battle against a hospitable and yet recalcitrant environment, which is the pre-eminent mark of American life; no other makes it more real, more poignant, more genuinely dramatic and moving; and no other evokes with greater skill the failure and heart-break that must be, for all the easy success it shows, its normal and preponderous issue."
Baltimore Sun - H. L. Mencken (08/04/1916)
"We do not...recommend the book to the fastidious reader, or the one who clings to 'old-fashioned ideas.' It is a book one can very well get along without reading."
New York Times Book Review (05/25/1907)
"SISTER CARRIE was finished in May, 1900. It has become one of the most historic books in modern American literature, and its widespread acceptance as an American classic marks a major victory that has been won for American letters against the Philistines. With this first novel, Theodore Dreiser demonstrated that he was head and shoulders above his contemporaries. No other writer in America during the present century has exerted as great a moral force on his successors. No other novelist has done more than he to free American letters....In essence, a book stands the test of time when we can translate its meaning into our experiences in our own time and see that it remains significant and alive. And that, I insist, can be done with 'Sister Carrie'. It is one of the major novels in 20th-century American literature."
New York Times Book Review - James T. Farrell (07/04/1943)
"SISTER CARRIE, a cause célèbre in American letters, is not that great a book, it must be said. Even if you pass over Dreiser's clunky Darwinian lectures, his schoolmarmish asides about psychology and morals, you have to conclude that this is no ANNA KARENINA Nobody would confuse this with Dickens. It isn't even James T. Farrell. It is a work of historical interest."
Salon - Garrison Keillor (10/13/1997)
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