Simon Winchester's books include Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, and Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, a history of the world’s second-largest ocean.With Daisy Banks at The Browser, he discussed five novels about the social history of America's expanding frontiers from the late 19th century to the Great Depression, including:
Sister CarrieRead about another novel Winchester tagged at The Browser.
by Theodore Dreiser
...Let’s finish with Sister Carrie, a novel by Theodore Dreiser which first came out in a censored version in 1900.
This is really the converse of most of the things I have been talking about here. Carrie is a very beautiful woman who came from Wisconsin. Some people thought this was a book about nuns, but it wasn’t. There is no nun-like behaviour in the book at all. Quitethe reverse! Carrie goes to Chicago and falls in with a swell [a dandy]. He takes her on as his mistress, and her life is tremendously up and down. She has an affair with a man who is married, and is then taken to New York and lives in Lower Manhattan with a man who ultimately treats her badly.
But she is determined to succeed, and makes it as a well-known starlet in up-market theatrical performances, while her lover declines to beggary. She ultimately leaves him and gives him $20, – the same sum, ironically, that she was given on her first date with the swell in Chicago. So this is an urban story which is gritty and shows real life. As a consequence of that it was frowned upon hugely at the time it was published, and as you mentioned it was heavily censored. But now it is regarded as a classic of early American modernist literature.
Sister Carrie is one of Neil Pearson's six best books.
Also see Simon Winchester's six favorite books about sailing.
--Marshal Zeringue
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