"For a century, Theodore Dreiser has represented for many readers a rebellious modernism whose novels both critiqued the American dream and embodied a bleakly deterministic perception of life. His first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), was reluctantly published and then ignored by its publisher, who thought the book immoral. Another publisher withdrew his fifth movel, The "Genius" (1915), rather than face prosecution on obscenity charges. Dreiser did...

When a girl leaves home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. With Sister Carrie, first published in 1900, Theodore Dreiser transformed the conventional fallen woman story into a genuinely innovative and powerful work of fiction. As he hurled his impressionable midwestern heroine into the throbbing, amoral world of...