Theodore Dreiser

Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser

Publisher Marketing: When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, 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. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken. To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours-a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister's address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be. Review Citations: Entertainment Weekly 08/13/2004 pg. 93 (EAN 9781404333024, Hardcover) Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2006 pg. 267 (EAN 9780140188288, Paperback) Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2010 pg. 185 (EAN 9780140188288, Paperback) Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2014 pg. 237 (EAN 9780140188288, Paperback) Contributor Bio:  Dreiser, Theodore Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was an American author and an outstanding representative of naturalism, whose novels depict real-life subjects in a harsh light. Dreiser's novels, particularly "Sister Carrie", were held to be amoral, and he battled throughout his career against censorship and popular taste.