Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics S - Theodore Dreiser [223]
—from The Athenaeum (September 7, 1901)
NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW
Theodore Dreiser’s frankly realistic story called “Sister Carrie,” originally published seven years ago, is now published by Messrs. B. W. Dodge & Co., and deserves to be received as a new book, for it did not get a chance for recognition when it first appeared....
To an extraordinary degree the book is a photograph of conditions in the crude larger cities of America and of the people who make these conditions and are made by them. There is no attempt to complicate the facts as they are with notions of things as they should be morally, or as they might be sentimentally or aesthetically. People’s feelings are not considered. The author is quite impersonal. Withal, the story is interesting in spite of the commonplace character of the personages and the low plane of the gallery in which they move.... It may be added that the story even upon its first publication seven years ago attracted much attention and won favorable recognition in England. We do not, however, recommend the book to the fastidious reader, or the one who clings to “old-fashioned ideas.” It is a book one can very well get along without reading.
—May 25, 1907
SAN FRANCISCO ARGONAUT
When she eventually leaves Drouet and allows herself not quite unwillingly to be abducted by Hurstwood, a special scarlet label will describe the book as an immoral one, quite unsuited to the perusal of the young person and the boarding-school miss. But these critics will have little to say in condemnation of the immorality of a commercial system which offers young girls a wage of three or four dollars a week in payment for labor as destructive to the mind as to the body.
—August 3, 1907
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost forever is personified in [Dreiser].
—from Little Review (April 1916)
H. L. MENCKEN
[Dreiser’s] aim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thing he exposes is not the empty event and act, but the endless mystery out of which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in them that is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in “Pot-Bouille”—in Nietzsche’s phrase, for “the delight to stink”—then surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been underestimated....
His books remain, particularly his earlier books—and not all the ranting of the outraged orthodox will ever wipe them out. They were done in the stage of wonder, before self-consciousness began to creep in and corrupt it. The view of life that got into “Sister Carrie,” the first of them, was not the product of deliberate thinking out of Carrie’s problem. It simply got itself there by the force of the artistic passion behind it; its coherent statement had to wait for other and more reflective days. This complete rejection of ethical plan and purpose, this manifestation of what Nietzsche used to call moral innocence, is what brought up the guardians of the national tradition at the gallop, and created the Dreiser bugaboo of today. All the rubber-stamp formulae of American fiction were thrown overboard in these earlier books; instead of reducing the inexplicable to the obvious, they lifted the obvious to the inexplicable; one could find in them no orderly chain of causes and effects, of rewards and punishments; they represented life as a phenomenon at once terrible and unintelligible, like a stroke of lightning. The prevailing criticism applied the moral litmus. They were not