ANNOTATION

The driving forces of our culture -- restless idealism, glamorous material seductions and spiritual innocence -- are revealed in Dreiser's transformation of the conventional "fallen woman" story into a genuinely original work of imaginative fiction.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times Book Review