Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. “Dreiser’s first great novel, 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,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.

Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”ĭreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H.

Theodore Dreiser was arguably the most important figure in the development of fiction in the twentieth century.

Dreiser novel sister