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Informationen zum Autor Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. After a poor and difficult childhood, Dreiser broke into newspaper work in Chicago in 1892. A successful career as a magazine writer in New York during the late 1890s was followed by his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900). When this work made little impact, Dreiser published no fiction until Jennie Gerhardt in 1911. There then followed a decade and a half of major work in a number of literary forms, which was capped in 1925 by An American Tragedy , a novel that brought him universal acclaim. Dreiser was increasingly preoccupied by philosophical and political issues during the last two decades of his life. He died in Los Angeles. Klappentext "When a girl leaves home at eighteen! she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better! or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse." With Sister Carrie! first published in 1900! Theodore Dreiser transformed the conventional "fallen woman" story into a genuinely innovative and powerful work of fiction. As he hurled his impressionable midwestern heroine into the throbbing! amoral world of the big city! he revealed! with brilliant insight! the deep and driving forces of American culture: the restless idealism! glamorous materialism! and basic spiritual innocence. Sister Carrie brought American literature into the twentieth century. This volume! which reprints the text Dreiser approved for publication during his lifetime and includes a special appendix discussing his earlier! unedited manuscript! is the original standard edition of one of the great masterpieces 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. Chapter One THE MAGNET ATTRACTING: A WAIF AMID FORCES 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 characterized 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. When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the ci...
