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Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve Men

Edited by Richard Lehan

“Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, in their emotional intensity, are the most intimate and lyrical of his novels.” — New York Review of Books

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

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Theodore Dreiser was arguably the most important figure in the development of fiction in the twentieth century. In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H. L. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”

Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.

“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.

In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.

Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.

Richard Lehan, volume editor, is emeritus professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Theodore Dreiser: His World and His Novels and The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History, as well as studies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Story of the Week Happy 150th birthday, Theodore Dreiser
August 29, 2021

Story of the Week Theodore Dreiser, “A Traveler at Forty: Paris!”
August 27, 2019

Story of the Week Theodore Dreiser, “The Village Feudists”
August 27, 2019

The Moviegoer The “tragedy of desire” in An American Tragedy and A Place in the Sun
March 15, 2017

News Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie: America’s pure product and the gift of a young virgin
October 7, 2016
Table of Contents

Sister Carrie

Jennie Gerhardt

Twelve Men
Peter
A Doer of the Word
My Brother Paul
The County Doctor
Culhane, the Solid Man
A True Patriarch
De Maupassant, Junior
The Village Feudists
Vanity, Vanity
The Mighty Rourke
A Mayor and His People
W. L. S.

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ISBN: 978-0-94045041-7 1168 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 36 Library of America Series

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