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.’
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