5/30/2023 0 Comments Theodore dreiser's sister carrie![]() ![]() Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life and beauty and terror.” Even when championed, he is our pure product.Īnd you have to admit Sister Carrie has it all. ![]() When Sinclair Lewis accepted his Nobel Prize in 1930, he said that Dreiser, “marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. His best novel, Sister Carrie, comes a respectable thirty-third on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best. You get to imagining Dreiser as some American golem, made from native mud. Critics who champion him do so because “dullness and stupidity must naturally suggest a virtuous democracy” (Trilling again). Dreiser has “the awkwardness, the chaos, the heaviness which we associate with reality,” Lionel Trilling said. He is boorish, and dull, and a poor stylist (“rhetorical bungling” is how Sandy Petrey put it) he is self-made, and crude. If you read the critical literature, Theodore Dreiser is one giant American cliché. Sister Carrie first edition (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1900) Guest blog post by Anne Trubek, critic, blogger, and author of A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie: America’s pure product and the gift of a young virgin ![]()
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