Description
“When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she fallsinto saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standardof virtue and becomes worse.” With Sister Carrie, first published in 1900, TheodoreDreiser transformed the conventional “fallen woman” story into a genuinely innovativeand powerful work of fiction. As he hurled his impressionable midwestern heroineinto the throbbing, amoral world of the big city, he revealed, with brilliant insight,the deep and driving forces of American culture: the restless idealism, glamorousmaterialism, and basic spiritual innocence.Sister Carrie brought American literatureinto the twentieth century. This volume, which reprints the text Dreiser approvedfor publication during his lifetime and includes a special appendix discussing hisearlier, unedited manuscript, is the original standard edition of one of the greatmasterpieces of literary realism.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
