Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (best book clubs .TXT) 📕
Description
Caroline Meeber, known as Sister Carrie to her family, moves to Chicago at the tender age of eighteen to try to make something of herself. Living with her sister and brother-in-law, she quickly finds that life, and work, are hard in the big city. She soon takes up with a traveling salesman she met on the train into town. Months later her eye is turned by one of the salesman’s acquaintances, George Hurstwood, and vice-versa. A series of events lead Carrie and Hurstwood to New York City, where both struggle to live out the aspirations that brought them there.
Theodore Dreiser was one of the earliest naturalist writers, but he wrote Sister Carrie while the United States was still very Victorian in its morals. The book therefore caused a stir from the beginning: Carrie Meeber was clearly, even in the disguised language of the time, a sexually active, unmarried female, who wasn’t made to suffer for her indiscretion to the extent considered necessary at the time. Dreiser’s depiction of rough language merely added to the controversy. The first printing sold only 456 copies in two years; it was to be another five years before Dreiser could convince another publisher to carry the book. Today it’s considered a classic and one of the “greatest of all American urban novels.”
The text of Sister Carrie was unchanged until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published a new version with 36,000 words restored. The edition was not without controversy: the cuts were originally made before the first printing at the suggestion of Dreiser’s wife, or his friend Arthur Henry, and Dreiser had approved all of them. Although the new Pennsylvania Edition, as it is called, made a good case for restoring the changes, it is the 1907 text that remains the most widely available today, and it is that text in this edition.
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- Author: Theodore Dreiser
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In the drive of the wind and sleet they pushed in on one another. There were wrists, unprotected by coat or pocket, which were red with cold. There were ears, half covered by every conceivable semblance of a hat, which still looked stiff and bitten. In the snow they shifted, now one foot, now another, almost rocking in unison.
With the growth of the crowd about the door came a murmur. It was not conversation, but a running comment directed at anyone in general. It contained oaths and slang phrases.
“By damn, I wish they’d hurry up.”
“Look at the copper watchin’.”
“Maybe it ain’t winter, nuther!”
“I wisht I was in Sing Sing.”
Now a sharper lash of wind cut down and they huddled closer. It was an edging, shifting, pushing throng. There was no anger, no pleading, no threatening words. It was all sullen endurance, unlightened by either wit or good fellowship.
A carriage went jingling by with some reclining figure in it. One of the men nearest the door saw it.
“Look at the bloke ridin’.”
“He ain’t so cold.”
“Eh, eh, eh!” yelled another, the carriage having long since passed out of hearing.
Little by little the night crept on. Along the walk a crowd turned out on its way home. Men and shop-girls went by with quick steps. The crosstown cars began to be crowded. The gas lamps were blazing, and every window bloomed ruddy with a steady flame. Still the crowd hung about the door, unwavering.
“Ain’t they ever goin’ to open up?” queried a hoarse voice, suggestively.
This seemed to renew the general interest in the closed door, and many gazed in that direction. They looked at it as dumb brutes look, as dogs paw and whine and study the knob. They shifted and blinked and muttered, now a curse, now a comment. Still they waited and still the snow whirled and cut them with biting flakes. On the old hats and peaked shoulders it was piling. It gathered in little heaps and curves and no one brushed it off. In the centre of the crowd the warmth and steam melted it, and water trickled off hat rims and down noses, which the owners could not reach to scratch. On the outer rim the piles remained unmelted. Hurstwood, who could not get in the centre, stood with head lowered to the weather and bent his form.
A light appeared through the transom overhead. It sent a thrill of possibility through the watchers. There was a murmur of recognition. At last the bars grated inside and the crowd pricked up its ears. Footsteps shuffled within and it murmured again. Someone called: “Slow up there, now,” and then the door opened. It was push and jam for a minute, with grim, beast silence to prove its quality, and then it melted inward, like logs floating, and disappeared. There were wet hats and wet shoulders, a cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass, pouring in between bleak walls. It was just six o’clock and there was supper in every hurrying pedestrian’s face. And yet no supper was provided here—nothing but beds.
Hurstwood laid down his fifteen cents and crept off with weary steps to his allotted room. It was a dingy affair—wooden, dusty, hard. A small gas-jet furnished sufficient light for so rueful a corner.
“Hm!” he said, clearing his throat and locking the door.
Now he began leisurely to take off his clothes, but stopped first with his coat, and tucked it along the crack under the door. His vest he arranged in the same place. His old wet, cracked hat he laid softly upon the table. Then he pulled off his shoes and lay down.
It seemed as if he thought a while, for now he arose and turned the gas out, standing calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few moments, in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesitated, he turned the gas on again, but applied no match. Even then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room. When the odour reached his nostrils, he quit his attitude and fumbled for the bed.
“What’s the use?” he said, weakly, as he stretched himself to rest.
And now Carrie had attained that which in the beginning seemed life’s object, or, at least, such fraction of it as human beings ever attain of their original desires. She could look about on her gowns and carriage, her furniture and bank account. Friends there were, as the world takes it—those who would bow and smile in acknowledgment of her success. For these she had once craved. Applause there was, and publicity—once far off, essential things, but now grown trivial and indifferent. Beauty also—her type of loveliness—and yet she was lonely. In her rocking-chair she sat, when not otherwise engaged—singing and dreaming.
Thus in life there is ever the intellectual and the emotional nature—the mind that reasons, and the mind that feels. Of one come the men of action—generals and statesmen; of the other, the poets and dreamers—artists all.
As harps in the wind, the latter respond to every breath of fancy, voicing in their moods all the ebb and flow of the ideal.
Man has not yet comprehended the dreamer any more than he has the ideal. For him the laws and morals of the world are unduly severe. Ever hearkening to the sound of beauty, straining for the flash of its distant wings, he watches to follow, wearying his feet in travelling. So watched Carrie, so followed, rocking and
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