She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Skin satchel holding some minor details of the toilet, a small lunch in a paper box and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. ''When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago,'' the 28-year-old journalist began his first novel, ''her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, which was checked in the baggage car, a cheap imitation alligator The judge judges,'' in Whitman's words, ''but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.'' The underside of American life, his Sophoclean vision and passion? Like Walt Whitman's democratic hero-poet, Dreiser the novelist was ''the equable man,'' and, if he judged, it was ''not as Though it is more carefully wrought than most of Dreiser's workaday prose, it introduces a challengeĬommon to all of Dreiser's fiction: How could his rough craft, his apparent impatience with stylistic force, grace and nuance, be reconciled with his undeniable power to move and persuade, his astonishing ability to render '' Sister Carrie's'' opening paragraph is virtually identical in the two versions. (Penguin Books will publish this text next month at $3.95, with an introduction by Alfred Kazin, and without all of the scholarly apparatus.) It is now published anew by the University of Pennsylvania Press in an augmented text that the editors have established from the original manuscript and typescript. Paper, $12.95.įEW American novels have been launched into the stream of naturalism and literary history as decisively as Theodore Dreiser's '' Sister Carrie,'' first published with great reluctanceīy Doubleday, Page and Company in 1900 and reprinted many times since.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Section 7, Column 1 Book Review Deskīy JUSTIN KAPLAN Justin Kaplan's ''Walt Whitman: A Life'' received the 1981 American Book Award for biography. May 31, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edition The New York Times: Book Review Search Article
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