Sister Carrie

First edition thus. New York Public Library Collector's Edition. 12mo. Pp. xxxiv, 585. Quarter-bound brown cloth over light cream paper boards, lettered in silver to spine; deckled fore-edge. Striped blue-grey endpapers. Frontispiece photograph of Theodore Dreiser, ca. 1900. Illustrated with original art and handwritten letters, diaries, and manuscripts from the Library's collections. Jacket design by Jean Traina. Book design by Marysarah Quinn.

A naïve small town girl moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman. Featuring an ingenious heroine, who goes unpunished for her transgressions against conventional sexual morality, Dreiser's revolutionary first novel is now regarded as the first masterpiece of the American naturalistic movement.

Originally published in 1900, Sister Carrie was effectively suppressed after publication by Doubleday, Page until 1912. To facilitate publication an estimated 36,000 words were excised from the manuscript, a process that rendered Carrie's motivations incoherent, and the project "stillborn". Even so, of its first print run of 1008 copies, almost half were remaindered. All subsequent editions were censored until the scholarly University of Pennsylvania Press edition of 1981. Based on that edition, this unexpurgated version restores the novel's bleak, dramatically consistent endings, its full characterizations, its profanity and sexual references, and its original place and character names.

Exultantly praised by Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, Sister Carrie now ranks amongst Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Basis for Carrie, the Oscar-nominated 1952 feature film, directed by William Wyler, which starred Jennifer Jones and Laurence Olivier.

[Orton, Dreiseriana, 17]