DREISER, Theodore.

£7,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Sister Carrie. First edition of a landmark work of American realism. Accepted by Doubleday, Page, despite the personal objections of Frank Doubleday, the novel was published in a punitively small edition in November 1900. The author's bibliographer writes that Sister Carrie is "the only Dreiser first edition that can truthfully be described as very scarce" (McDonald).Provenance: May Stratton Vance, the wife of the editor and publisher Arthur Vance, with her pencilled ownership signature on the front free endpaper. Dreiser and Vance both edited magazines in the first decades of the 20th century: Vance managed the Pictorial Review, Dreiser the women's magazine The Delineator. The two enjoyed a particularly memorable liquid lunch in 1924 with Dreiser's agent Otto Liveright and the journalist Burton Rascoe. While a drunken Dreiser "happily began rubbing salad dressing in Dr. Clifford Smythe's hair", Vance made the author a business proposition: "If you will write a story that hasn't a prostitute or a kept woman in it, I promise to buy it and pay our top price!" (quoted in Rascoe, p. 212). Dreiser assented, writing "Glory Be! McGlathery", which was published in Vance's Pictorial Review in January 1925. It was reprinted under the title "St Columba and the River" in Dreiser's short story collection Chains (1927).

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