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Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men
Theodore Dreiser was arguably the most important figure in the development of fiction in the twentieth century. In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H. L. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”
Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.
“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.
In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.
Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.
Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.
“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.
In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.
Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.
1168 pages, Hardcover
First published June 15, 1987
16 people are currently reading
177 people want to read
About the author
Theodore Dreiser
455 books921 followersNaturalistic novels of American writer and editor Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser portray life as a struggle against ungovernable forces. Value of his portrayed characters lies in their persistence against all obstacles, not their moral code, and literary situations more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency; this American novelist and journalist so pioneered the naturalist school.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore...
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 11, 2021
3 1/2 stars Sister Carrie
August 27, 2009
Theodore Dreiser's works hold up well as storytelling while offering the added advantage of being timepieces.
"Sister Carrie" and "Jennie Gerhardt" are similar tales of young girls whose youthful sexuality aid their flight from poverty.
Carrie and Jennie are sympathetic, nonetheless, because their climbs up the social latter are propelled, not by their own guile, but by that of the wealthy men who would deign to enjoy their youthful bounty.
Both attain fates that are only satisfactory and we will leave it at that so as not to spoil either novel's end point.
Dreiser wrote in a smooth style with more than a touch of density to it. He often erred on the side of expository writing, describing events and also telling you what they meant, rather than hitching them to action.
Nonetheless, the tales can hook you and make for engrossing reading because of the writer's thoroughness and the extreme polish he gave the prose.
The "Twelve Men" portion of the book is lengthy as either novel, without the advantage of narrative continuity, but still offers much. The characters are colorful, but unique mostly as products of a time that has passed and therefore impossible to duplicate or find in contemporary types.
Althought he lived well into the 1940s, these works are essentially post-Civil War works rendered by a younger man of German family reared in Indiana. His America is that of the Industrial Revolution. It is that bygone America where the beehive of industry is clustered along the shores of the Great Lakes.
Its gritty capitals are Chicago and Detroit and their supporting casts are the smaller towns of his home state, Illinois, and Ohio. Railroads are king and the poor loiter around tracks looking for spare bits of coal that drop from hopper cars to warm their homes.
His New York is the New York of Broadway when Broadway was alone and uncontested by the film business for supremacy in the world of spectacle. It is the New York of the horse-drawn carriage and mule-driven dray, of the great Gilded Age fortunes.
This Library of America collection offers a view of these bygone eras and the people who strove in them through the skilled writing hand and practiced journalist's eye of an American literary stalwart.
"Sister Carrie" and "Jennie Gerhardt" are similar tales of young girls whose youthful sexuality aid their flight from poverty.
Carrie and Jennie are sympathetic, nonetheless, because their climbs up the social latter are propelled, not by their own guile, but by that of the wealthy men who would deign to enjoy their youthful bounty.
Both attain fates that are only satisfactory and we will leave it at that so as not to spoil either novel's end point.
Dreiser wrote in a smooth style with more than a touch of density to it. He often erred on the side of expository writing, describing events and also telling you what they meant, rather than hitching them to action.
Nonetheless, the tales can hook you and make for engrossing reading because of the writer's thoroughness and the extreme polish he gave the prose.
The "Twelve Men" portion of the book is lengthy as either novel, without the advantage of narrative continuity, but still offers much. The characters are colorful, but unique mostly as products of a time that has passed and therefore impossible to duplicate or find in contemporary types.
Althought he lived well into the 1940s, these works are essentially post-Civil War works rendered by a younger man of German family reared in Indiana. His America is that of the Industrial Revolution. It is that bygone America where the beehive of industry is clustered along the shores of the Great Lakes.
Its gritty capitals are Chicago and Detroit and their supporting casts are the smaller towns of his home state, Illinois, and Ohio. Railroads are king and the poor loiter around tracks looking for spare bits of coal that drop from hopper cars to warm their homes.
His New York is the New York of Broadway when Broadway was alone and uncontested by the film business for supremacy in the world of spectacle. It is the New York of the horse-drawn carriage and mule-driven dray, of the great Gilded Age fortunes.
This Library of America collection offers a view of these bygone eras and the people who strove in them through the skilled writing hand and practiced journalist's eye of an American literary stalwart.
November 26, 2018
For some time I've been meaning to read Dreiser beyond the short stories I know -- and given that this book was inspired in part by Tess of the D'Urbervilles (one of my favorites), I chose it as my first novel of his to dive into. Jennie's story really struck me where it counts -- there were several places where I actually burst into tears while reading it. The novel put me in close touch with some of the issues I'm dealing with in my own work. This problem of ownership in relationships finds some focus in the novel, as do the long-term effects of basing one's decisions on money instead of love. Grateful for Dreiser now. I reckon, like all great loves, his work showed up right when I needed it most.
November 18, 2010
I understand that there are two versions of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, one unexpurgated and the other 'tamed down'. I do not know if this was a 'tamed down' version - probably so, since I didn't see any racy scenes - but even so, a fascinating look at life in those times (early 1900's). Both "Sister Carrie" and "Jennie Gerhardt" are the stories of a girl who was used by men, but survived nevertheless. There's a strong feeling on my part that Dreiser was trying to understand the men in the story far more than the women, despite making the women the title characters. Neither story would be shocking by today's standards, but their sympathetic portrayals of women who allow themselves to be 'kept' must have been a bit startling at the time. The read is slightly 'sludgy', in keeping with literature of the day, but still very enjoyable.
Read
October 16, 2016I feel that I have lived fully by reading Sister Carrie. Such profound insight into the human experience. Took me to Chicago and NY of 1900. The pages will live with me as long as I'm alive.
April 10, 2024
Love Jenny!
May 14, 2025
What a prodigious writer Dreiser was! His earnestness in capturing the minutiae of his character's lives is extraordinary. In so doing, he illustrated his belief that people were caught up in the web of circumstances of their lives and personalities, that the course they ploughed in life was largely "destined".
I read Twelve Men first, and his portraits of these disparate individuals reveal just how much he could admire those who'd made the best of the cards they'd been dealt. It's a credit to Dreiser (and anyone for that matter) that he/she can find in others virtues that demand exaltation/veneration.
Jennie Gerhardt was a revelation, somewhat on the lines of Sister Carrie, but even though the eponymous heroine and the love of her life do not end up together, this novel again limns the ways in which society directs peoples' actions even when these constraints are contrary to natural/instinctive inclination.
I re-read Sister Carrie, which I'd read nearly a half-century ago. I wonder what it was that I took away from the novel at that tender age... Hurstwood's plight and Carrie's fortunate equanimity come to the fore in this reading, and Dreiser makes clear the ways society (a capitalist one in this case) creates desire and dissatisfaction.
A good representative statement of Dreiser's thinking, from Jennie Gerhardt:
"He could not make out what it was all about. In distant ages a queer thing had come to pass. There had started on its way in the form of evolution a minute cellular organism which had apparently reproduced itself by division, had early learned to combine itself with others, to organize itself into bodies, strange forms of fish, animals, and birds, and had finally learned to organize itself into man. Man, on his part, composed as he was of self-organizing cells, was pushing himself forward into comfort and different aspects of existence by means of union and organization with other men. Why? Heaven only knew. Here he was endowed with a peculiar brain and a certain amount of talent, and he had inherited a certain amount of wealth which he now scarcely believed he deserved, only luck had favored him. But he could not see that any one else might be said to deserve this wealth any more than himself, seeing that his use of it was as conservative and constructive and practical as the next one's. He might have been born poor, in which case he would have been as well satisfied as the next one—not more so. Why should he complain, why worry, why speculate?—the world was going steadily forward of its own volition, whether he would would or no. Truly it was. And was there any need for him to disturb himself about it? There was not. He fancied at times that it might as well never have been started at all. 'The one divine, far-off event' of the poet did not appeal to him as having any basis in fact..."
I read Twelve Men first, and his portraits of these disparate individuals reveal just how much he could admire those who'd made the best of the cards they'd been dealt. It's a credit to Dreiser (and anyone for that matter) that he/she can find in others virtues that demand exaltation/veneration.
Jennie Gerhardt was a revelation, somewhat on the lines of Sister Carrie, but even though the eponymous heroine and the love of her life do not end up together, this novel again limns the ways in which society directs peoples' actions even when these constraints are contrary to natural/instinctive inclination.
I re-read Sister Carrie, which I'd read nearly a half-century ago. I wonder what it was that I took away from the novel at that tender age... Hurstwood's plight and Carrie's fortunate equanimity come to the fore in this reading, and Dreiser makes clear the ways society (a capitalist one in this case) creates desire and dissatisfaction.
A good representative statement of Dreiser's thinking, from Jennie Gerhardt:
"He could not make out what it was all about. In distant ages a queer thing had come to pass. There had started on its way in the form of evolution a minute cellular organism which had apparently reproduced itself by division, had early learned to combine itself with others, to organize itself into bodies, strange forms of fish, animals, and birds, and had finally learned to organize itself into man. Man, on his part, composed as he was of self-organizing cells, was pushing himself forward into comfort and different aspects of existence by means of union and organization with other men. Why? Heaven only knew. Here he was endowed with a peculiar brain and a certain amount of talent, and he had inherited a certain amount of wealth which he now scarcely believed he deserved, only luck had favored him. But he could not see that any one else might be said to deserve this wealth any more than himself, seeing that his use of it was as conservative and constructive and practical as the next one's. He might have been born poor, in which case he would have been as well satisfied as the next one—not more so. Why should he complain, why worry, why speculate?—the world was going steadily forward of its own volition, whether he would would or no. Truly it was. And was there any need for him to disturb himself about it? There was not. He fancied at times that it might as well never have been started at all. 'The one divine, far-off event' of the poet did not appeal to him as having any basis in fact..."
January 19, 2017
Sister Carrie
Carrie leaves a small town in Illinois to live with her sister's family in Chicago where there are more opportunities for her to make a living. On the train ride to the city she is approached by a slick salesman names Druet who gives her his card and promises to look in on her. Carrie is taken by all of the attractions of the city but soon realizes her brother-in-law lives simply, works hard and hopes to one day own a home in the suburbs. She looks for work and when she does land work, conditions are poor, the work difficult, and management distant and harsh.
As her situation becomes more bleak, she rationalizes leaving her sisters family to become Druet's live in mistress. This arrangement is a moral compromise for her but the lifestyle's trappings are too strong a draw for her. However, the longer she stays the clearer it becomes the Druet has no intention of following through with a marriage proposal.
Another opportunity presents itself in Hearstwood, Druet's wealthier friend who finds himself enchanted by Carrie and disenchanted with his wife. His obsession leads him to steal money from his employers and escape with Carrie to Canada, though they end up in New York.
Hearstwood falls from a great height, Carrie rises, and Druet maintains his status. Dreiser provides a look at a woman's rise mostly by chance encounter in an era before suffrage. Love in this novel isn't present. The characters simply fall into varying degrees of attraction often in search of other forms of satisfaction; usually status and security. Hearstwood's fall is particularly hard to watch with his self assuring refrain "maybe tomorrow". Carrie rises through pure talent entirely, she doesn't study or work for her skill it is simply within her.
Carrie leaves a small town in Illinois to live with her sister's family in Chicago where there are more opportunities for her to make a living. On the train ride to the city she is approached by a slick salesman names Druet who gives her his card and promises to look in on her. Carrie is taken by all of the attractions of the city but soon realizes her brother-in-law lives simply, works hard and hopes to one day own a home in the suburbs. She looks for work and when she does land work, conditions are poor, the work difficult, and management distant and harsh.
As her situation becomes more bleak, she rationalizes leaving her sisters family to become Druet's live in mistress. This arrangement is a moral compromise for her but the lifestyle's trappings are too strong a draw for her. However, the longer she stays the clearer it becomes the Druet has no intention of following through with a marriage proposal.
Another opportunity presents itself in Hearstwood, Druet's wealthier friend who finds himself enchanted by Carrie and disenchanted with his wife. His obsession leads him to steal money from his employers and escape with Carrie to Canada, though they end up in New York.
Hearstwood falls from a great height, Carrie rises, and Druet maintains his status. Dreiser provides a look at a woman's rise mostly by chance encounter in an era before suffrage. Love in this novel isn't present. The characters simply fall into varying degrees of attraction often in search of other forms of satisfaction; usually status and security. Hearstwood's fall is particularly hard to watch with his self assuring refrain "maybe tomorrow". Carrie rises through pure talent entirely, she doesn't study or work for her skill it is simply within her.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 23, 2007
here is my review of sister carrie. this is a good book. i read it and i enjoyed it. i would recommend it to anyone who likes books. hurstwood kills himself, and the book ends with carrie, rocking in her chair, thinking of pretty things to buy. or something. its depressing but beautiful.
i still haven't read jennie gerhardt.
but '12 men' is fantastic. it details 12 men that dreiser got to know through the course of his life. some of them - including his foreman working for a railroad company, and the health instructor at teh sanitorium he voluntarily checks himself into - are hilarious. the first one about his friend the artist is sad and moving. the one about his brother paul the musician is poignant. really really reccomend reading this if you can come across a copy.
i still haven't read jennie gerhardt.
but '12 men' is fantastic. it details 12 men that dreiser got to know through the course of his life. some of them - including his foreman working for a railroad company, and the health instructor at teh sanitorium he voluntarily checks himself into - are hilarious. the first one about his friend the artist is sad and moving. the one about his brother paul the musician is poignant. really really reccomend reading this if you can come across a copy.
July 6, 2011
I'm sure it was a shocking revelation when it was written, but now a days it just seemed kind of boring and mundane. Read it because I knew I was supposed to, but didn't really like the characters and the men were totally unrelatable in 2011.
reh
reh
February 7, 2010
The first "adult" book I ever read was Sister Carrie. It impacted me so much as a sixteen years old young woman. The ending, Carrie, in a rocking chair, still haunts me.
April 29, 2012
Sister Carrie was not the innocent story of a young lady. She had dreams and expectations in life, and money was everything.
September 14, 2018
Sister Carrie - finished 08.15.16
Jennie Gearhardt - finished 05.07.17
Twelve Men - finished 09.13.18
Jennie Gearhardt - finished 05.07.17
Twelve Men - finished 09.13.18
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews