Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie is a novel published in 1900 by the American author Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser uses the story of Caroline Meeber, a naïve young woman who gets caught up in the gaudy venality of the city, to explore the emptiness of materialism, the tension between flesh and spirit, the inevitability of loneliness, and the role of women in the emerging America of the new century. Now recognized as one of the defining expressions of American literary naturalism and ranked by Modern Library, the prestigious publishing house, among the 100 most important English-language works of the twentieth century, the book sold fewer than 400 copies in its first year. Contemporary critics lambasted Dreiser for his plodding style, ignoring the book’s groundbreaking approach to anatomizing the complex relationship between individuals and their socio-cultural environment.

The importance of the novel and of Dreiser would be confirmed nearly three decades later when Dreiser was shortlisted to become the first American writer awarded the Nobel Prize. Like Mark Twain before him and Kurt Vonnegut after him, Dreiser trained an uncompromising moral awareness on a culture and a nation that had fallen far short of its ideals by confusing opportunity with opportunism.