Sister Carrie (Barnes & Noble Classics S - Theodore Dreiser [5]
1926 Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed, an unremarkable book of Dreiser’s verse, appears
1927 At the invitation of the Soviet government, Dreiser goes to Moscow for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Virginia Woolf publishes To The Light-house. The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, introduces talking motion pictures.
1928 Dreiser Looks at Russia, an account of Dreiser’s visit to the Soviet Union, is published.
1929 Dreiser publishes A Gallery of Women, a two-volume collection of fifteen fictionalized profiles of women he has either known or wants to celebrate. The American stock market collapses, initiating the Great Depression. Thomas Wolfe publishes Look Homeward Angel. By observing distant galaxies, Edwin Hubble determines that the universe is expanding.
1931 Dreiser publishes the anti-capitalist treatise Tragic America and a memoir titled Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth. He delivers a speech at New York’s Town Hall characterizing the Alabama rape trial of the Scottsboro boys as legal lynching. Josef von Sternberg’s film version of An American Tragedy opens. Robert Frost’s Collected Poems wins the Pulitzer Prize. The Empire State Building, the tallest skyscraper ever built, opens.
1938 Dreiser settles in California permanently with Helen Richardson.
1939 World War II breaks out in Europe. John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath. Film classics Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz premiere.
1941 The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II.
1942 Sara White Dreiser dies after thirty years of separation from her husband.
1944 Dreiser marries his longtime companion Helen Richardson. Tennessee Williams debuts his play The Glass Menagerie on Broadway. On June 6 U.S. forces land at Normandy.
1945 After joining the Communist Party early in the year, Theodore Dreiser dies on December 28, in Hollywood, California. Richard Wright publishes Black Boy. The United States drops atomic bombs on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Europe, World War II ends on May 8.
1946 The Bulwark is published.
1947 The Stoic, the last novel in Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Desire,” is published. A collection of Dreiser’s short fiction, The Best Short Stories, is published.
1951 A Place in the Sun, a film adaptation of An American Tragedy, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, opens.
1952 William Wyler’s film Carrie opens, starring Laurence Olivier as Hurstwood, Jennifer Jones as Carrie, and Eddie Albert as Drouet.
Introduction
Since its publication in 1900, Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, has incited two kinds of controversy: moral and artistic. When Dreiser submitted his book to the respectable publishing firm of Doubleday, Page and Co., it was initially met with enthusiasm. Serving as a reader, the novelist Frank Norris strongly recommended that the book be acquired. Walter Page also admired the novel. But when Mrs. Doubleday read the manuscript, she argued vehemently that it was an immoral work and urged her husband Frank not to publish it. Why? Because the author did not punish Carrie, a kept woman, with death or disgrace, as the wages of sin deserved, but rewarded her with success in the theater and material comfort. Mrs. Doubleday would not have been swayed by the blunt judgment of an interviewer for the New York Herald in 1907: Sister Carrie “reverses the canting code of the cheap novelist—the woman transgresses, but the man pays.” A disinterested judge might construe Carrie’s failed pursuit of happiness as a harsh fate, but to the custodians of conventional morality that argument countenanced exposing vulnerable young women like Carrie to a life of vice. Even in the wake of the Gilded Age’s sensational scandals—the Beecher-Tilton trial, in which influential Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher was accused of adultery with one of his parishioners, and the murder of the distinguished architect Stanford White by Harry Thaw, a jealous