Dreiser Theodore Dreiser 
Sister Carrie 

American writing, before and after Dreiser’s time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin, ‚ said H. L. Mencken. Sister Carrie, Dreiser’s great first novel, transformed the conventional ‚fallen woman‘ story into a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Naive young Caroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of the modern city, becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and then of a saloon manager, who elopes with her to New York. Both its subject matter and Dreiser’s unsparing, nonjudgmental approach made Sister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and the work retains the power to shock readers today. ‚Sister Carrie came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman, ‚ noted Sinclair Lewis. ‚Dreiser enlarged, willy-nilly, by a kind of historical accident if you will, the range of American literature, ‚ observed Robert Penn Warren. ‚[Sister Carrie] is a vivid and absorbing work of art.‘