Synopses & Reviews
Alone in the city, a young woman meets a man who promises to make her dreams come true. Eighteen-year-old Carrie is drawn to the glamour, wealth, and excitement of Chicago. But to be part of this glittering world, she will need much more money than she can even imagine. The only jobs she can find offer harsh conditions and little pay. Finally, inexperienced and desperate, she allows the smooth-talking salesman Charles Drouet to buy her meals and pretty clothes. Will Carrie ever find true happiness? And how much will she have to give up to get what she wants?
Theodore Dreiser's unsparing story of a country girl's rise to riches as the mistress of a wealthy man marked the beginning of the naturalist movement in America. Both its subject matter and Dreiser's objective, nonmoralizing approach made it highly controversial, and only a heavily edited version could be published in 1900.
Synopsis
The driving forces of our culture—restless idealism, glamorous material seductions, and spiritual innocence—are revealed in Theodore Dreiser's transformation of the conventional "fallen woman" story into a genuinely original work of imaginative fiction.
About the Author
Theodre Dreiser was born into a large and impoverished German American family in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871. He began his writing career as a reporter, working for newspapers in Chicago. Pittsburg, and St. Louis, until an editor friend, Arthur Henry, suggested he write a novel. The result was Sister Carrie, based on the life of Dreiser's own sister Emma, who had run off to New York with a married man. Rejected by several publishers as "immoral," the book was finally accepted by Doubleday and Company, and published-over Frank Doubleday's strong objections-in 1900.
Numerous cuts and changes had been made in the lengthy original manuscript by various hands, including those of Arthur Henry, Dreiser himself. Later, when given to mythologizing his career, Dreiser was to suggest that the publishing history of Sister Carrie had been one of bowdlerization and suppression only; but the publication of his unedited manuscript by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1981 shows that Dreiser approved and even welcomed Henry's and Jug's alterations. (Whether the book was ultimately improved or compromised by their liberal editing is a fascinating and as yet unresolved issue among Dreiser scholars.) Sister Carrie sold poorly, but writers like Frank Norris and William Dean Howells saw it as a breakthrough in American realism, and Dreiser's career as a novelist was launched.
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The Financer "(1912) and "The Titan "(1914) began his trilogy about the rise of a tycoon, but it was" An American Tragedy "(1925), based on newspaper accounts of a sensational murder case, which brought him fame. The novel was dramatized on Broadway and sold to Hollywood. Newly influential and affluent, Dreiservisited Russia and was unimpressed, describing his observations in the skeptical "Dreiser Looks at Russia" (1928). In later years, however, he became an ardent (through unorthodox) Communist, writing political Treatises such as "America Is Worth Saving" (1941) His artistic powers on the wane, Dreiser moved to Hollywood in 1939 and supported himself largely by the sale of film rights of his earlier works. He dies there, in 1945, at the age of seventy-four.
"From the Paperback edition."Rebecca Burns is editor-in-chief of Atlanta Magazine, which has won numerous regional and national awards under her direction.