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About the Salon
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About "Sister Carrie"
"Dreiser, more than any other man, is marching alone. Usually unappreciated, often hounded, he has cleared the trail from Victorian ... timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty, boldness and passion of life. Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life, beauty and terror."
-Sinclair Lewis during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech The story of America's first modern heroine is the story of Carrie Meeber who leaves her home in Wisconsin for the rapidly growing city of Chicago, full of hope and a desire for fashionable clothes and a life of amusement. Carrie's life is irrevocably altered when she falls ill, loses her low-paying factory job and becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman. Carrie's transgression, presented unapologetically by Dreiser, was scandalous to contemporary readers. According to the conventions of Victorian melodrama, a woman who loses her virtue must be punished with death or other disastrous consequences. The sensation caused by "Sister Carrie" lay in the fact that, for the first time in American literature, a woman had a sexual relationship outside of marriage and came away unscathed. "Sister Carrie" depicted the bitter struggles of the working classes and Dreiser was one of the earliest American authors to speak of poverty and the immigrant experience. For all of his efforts, Dreiser became a figure of artistic integrity to young writers as charges of obscenity dogged him and his work for the rest of his life. The struggles Dreiser faced after the publication of "Sister Carrie" were no more daunting than the ones he underwent trying to get the novel published. Knowing how readers would react to "Sister Carrie," Dreiser (with the help of his wife) significantly altered the manuscript to make the work less controversial and offensive. Doubleday demanded more severe cuts from "Sister Carrie" before publishing it, and the novel was sanitized a second time. Ninety-seven years later, in conjunction with The New York Public Library, Doubleday now offers the unexpurgated text previously available only in scholarly edition. Among the special features in the NYPL Collector's Edition of "Sister Carrie" are copies of Dreiser's letters to his friend, H. L. Mencken; drafts of Sister Carrie in various stages of revisions; and the plain red cover of the first edition of "Sister Carrie" (a design much detested by Dreiser who was convinced that the dull cover stemmed from his publisher's reluctance to promote the book). Also included in this edition are photographs (including Alfred Stieglitz's photograph "Winter -- Fifth Avenue," which was putatively the inspiration for a scene at the end of "Sister Carrie") and ephemera from the period that bring alive the turn-of-the-century theater world of Carrie Meeber. You have the option of purchasing your own copies of The New York Public Library Collector's editions of the classic books being discussed, courtesy of Borders Books and Music. Just click on the Borders icon below.
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