Sister Carrie (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

DREISER, Theodore (intro. Burton Rascoe; illus. Reginald Marsh). Sister Carrie. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1981.

Large Octavo. Full dark-green leather. Spine with three raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Pink silk moiré endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 387 pp. Illustrated throughout with drawings by Reginald Marsh. Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Masterpieces of American Literature series. Bookplate present but unadhered. Originally published New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1900.

Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) wrote Sister Carrie in 1899 with a directness and a refusal to pass moral judgment on his characters that his publisher found deeply unsettling. Doubleday, Page & Co. had contracted to publish the novel but, on reading it — or on Frank Doubleday's wife reading it and finding it too sordid — chose to limit the first printing to 1,008 copies and to distribute as few of them as possible. Fewer than 600 copies reached the public. The novel was not suppressed in any legal sense, but it was effectively buried, and Dreiser's early career was shaped by this near-destruction of his first book. All subsequent editions of Sister Carrie until 1981 were based on a bowdlerized version of the text from which Dreiser and a friend had removed approximately 36,000 words of the original to make it more commercially viable. It was not until the publication of the Pennsylvania Edition in 1981 — eighty-one years after first publication — that the novel was restored to the text Dreiser had originally written. The Easton Press edition of 1981 presents the complete text.

Carrie Meeber — Sister Carrie, though she is never called that — arrives in Chicago at eighteen with four dollars in her purse and proceeds to survive and then to thrive, through relationships with men who are successively less reputable and more entrapped by her than the last, until she achieves fame as an actress and finds herself alone at the top of a world she has climbed without ever quite intending to. The man left most thoroughly destroyed by her passage is George Hurstwood, a prosperous Chicago saloon manager who commits an act of near-theft to follow her to New York, loses everything, and ends in a flophouse. Dreiser's genius was to follow this trajectory without moralising about it in either direction: Carrie is not punished for her conduct, and Hurstwood is not exonerated by his suffering. The world the novel depicts simply operates the way it operates, and the characters move through it according to forces of desire and inertia that are presented as natural rather than sinful.

The illustrations by Reginald Marsh (1898–1954) — the American painter celebrated for his vivid, densely populated depictions of New York City life — bring to the novel a visual energy entirely commensurate with its subject, and the introduction by Burton Rascoe (1892–1957) sets the work in its literary and historical context. The Easton Press edition reprints the distinguished Heritage Press edition with both contributions intact.

Near fine. Marking to gilt upper edge; otherwise fine throughout. Bookplate present but unadhered.

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Catalogue Number: HH000600