Description
First edition, first printing of Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.
Octavo, [viii], 557pp, [3]. Publisher’s red cloth, title in black on front cover and spine. This is the first printing, with the same date listed on title and copyright pages. Solid text block, light wear to corners of covers, thin black scratches to front cover. Faint foxing along edges and endpapers. A very good copy. Previous ownership bookplate affixed to front endpaper. Housed in a custom red cloth chemise and red morocco slipcase.
(Atkinson p. 7) (MacDonald 1) (Pizer A00-1)
Edward McDonald, a bibliographer of Dreiser, claims “Sister Carrie… is the only Dreiser first edition that can truthfully be described as very scarce” (30). The Doubleday publishers considered the content in Sister Carrie to be morally questionable for the public and thus kept the first printing to just 1,000 copies in a simple, “innocuous” cloth binding. All editions of the novel following the first were an altered version of the text until a scholarly version based on the original manuscript was published in 1981.
