The publisher printed only one thousand copies, of which 456 were sold, bringing the author royalties of $68.40. The book had been accepted by Doubleday's partner, but Doubleday was appalled by what he considered an immoral, crudely written and potentially uncommercial book and tried to break his contract with Dreiser. Among the readers aggrieved by "Sister Carrie" was Dreiser's publisher, Frank Doubleday. Rather than punish her for her sins, Dreiser saw to it that she was rewarded. The city's literary flowering, called the Chicago Renaissance, included authors Edgar Lee Masters, Floyd Dell, Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg, as well as vital literary journals, from Margaret Anderson's Little Review to Harriet Monroe's Poetry to Ben Hecht's Chicago Literary Times.ĭreiser shared their opposition to the genteel tradition, and his pivotal novel established an enduring Chicago tradition: fiction in the raw, tawdry but compassionate.ĭreiser's novel tells the story of Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old who arrives in Chicago from Indiana "ambitious to gain in material things" and becomes the mistress of a salesman and manager of a saloon. Mencken saw Chicago, the "abattoir by Lake Michigan," as the source of inspiration to the nation's most important new writers at the beginning of the 20th Century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |