About this title: This novel about the effects of America's repressive moral climate was controversial in its day, and its availability to the public was delayed 12 years because of the "immorality" in Dreiser's sordid, realistic portrayal of the downfall of an innocent young woman who leaves her country town for the big city.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. some pages have small dog ears. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 480 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books, New York
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780140188288ISBN:0140188282
Description: Good. 499 p. Historical Editors: John C. Berky and Alice M. Waters; Textual Editor: James L. West III; General Editor: Neda M. Westlake. Introduction by Alfred Kazin. Also includes Suggestions for Further Reading and A Note on the Text. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics
Date Published: 1962
ISBN-13:9780451512062ISBN:0451512065
Description: Fair. No dust jacket as issued. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. Page 84/85 unhingned. Light rubbing and a light crease on cover. Some light underlining at begining of book but not distracting. read more
Edition: 4th Printing
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Dell, New York
Date Published: 1965
Description: Very Good. 16mo-over 5¾"-6¾" tall. Underlining to a few passages, not excessive. Name on first page. Light shelf wear. Solid copy. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics
Date Published: 1962-01-01
ISBN-13:9780451522733ISBN:0451522737
Description: Good. Clean copy with normal wear for condition. Spine condition is normal or better for the condition. May have book store stamp, price marking or former owner name. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Date Published: 1966
Description: Good. Good condition used paperback with some cover wear. Great reading copy! May have the previous owner's name inside front cover. read more
"So, reading this was a pretty weird experience. Between this and my inexplicable love of Zola's trashiest (I may just go back and bump Therese Raquin up to five stars...yeah, I said it), I think I must have a real weakness for Naturalism. Dreiser is no Zola (note to Ted: Stop thinking your repeated attempts to distill all women and poor people into single personalities via pithy one-liner are successful or even diverting. They aren't), but I couldn't put this down. I guess I like Carrie's spunk, as contrasted with the pathetic and generally awful Hurstwood...but really, not that much. When I like a book despite the characters, and despite the writing, what on earth is compelling me to give it four stars? I don't know. I enjoyed it."
"Three stars and "I will never finish this book"? What's that all about?
I'm not sure I read the book Dreiser wrote. I found the first half hilarious. Not unintentionally hilarious, and not campy hilarious, but genuinely hilarious. Dreiser is an old bitch, and has such contempt for his characters that I could not help but laugh aloud as I read it. He describes one character as an "empty chamber," and says another one looks at the world as if she's looking through a kaleidoscope, with each change and new sparkling thing catching her attention. Wonderful. Unfortunately, as things start to go bad for the characters, these delicious observations wane, so that you're left with a handful of sadly unlikeable people going through their paces to their inevitable end. Too bad."
"The chapters that chronicle Hurstwood's decline were particularly hard for me to read, they were so terribly sad, and while the feminist in me reveled in Carrie's ascent to independence, the humanist in me was galled by her lack of feelings of social responsibility and the way she allowed Hurstwood to sink. Drouet is a charming character, but nothing about him really provides much food for thought. At 550-something pages, Dreiser approaches Proustian verbosity, but without the graceful flourish of language. Still, he held my attention, and especially with the Chicago-New York comparison (one of my pet topics). A good book for a winter blizzard's day when you feel like contemplating American individuality and the perverted "survival of the fittest" mentality that assures us we can all pull ourselves up by the bootstraps (or, as babies, change our very own diapers)."
"I didn't care for this book so much because I thought it tended toward pulp fiction. Although the idea of a dissolute woman materially succeeding may have been shocking for the era this book was written, in the present age I find it not so much. In fact, the behavior of the woman in question, Carrie, would likely not be considered immoral by most people who read this book. The decline of fortune of the character Hurstwood was, however, well-depicted.
What I found most interesting in this volume is the introduction by Mr. Herbert Leibowitz. "Dreiser's novels moved readers because they brilliantly demonstrated the human costs of an unregulated system that enabled 'the high and mighty' to flourish while a huge segment of the population struggled merely to subsist." Does this passage not apply equally to the US in the current time of economic trouble? Things may have changed little after more than 100 years."
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