Sister Carrie

Dreiser's first novel, intertwining the story of a young woman seduced by the lure of the modern city with the story of a middle-aged man seduced by desire for Carrie herself, established a style and a realism which influenced many later writers.

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Theodore Dreiser had a hardscrabble youth and the years of newspaper work behind him when he began his first novel, "Sister Carrie," the story of a beautiful Midwestern girl who makes it big in New York City. Published by Doubleday in 1900, it gained a reputation as a shocker, for Dreiser had dared to give the public a heroine whose "cosmopolitan standard of virtue" brings her from Wisconsin, with four dollars in her purse, to a suite at the Waldorf and glittering fame as an actress. With "Sister Carrie," the original manuscript of which is in the New York Public Library collections, Dreiser told a tale not "sufficiently delicate" for many of its first readers and critics, but which is now universally recognized as one of the greatest and most influential American novels.