Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871. His father was a German Catholic immigrant, embittered by hard luck in business. His mother, by contrast, had seemingly endless resources of courage and hope for her ten children despite the staggering burden of bearing and raising them in poverty. The family moVed from one Indiana town to another as the father lost or found employment. In volume one of Dreiser's autobiography, Dawn, he remembers scavenging along the railroad tracks for coal for the family stove; but he testifies also to the joyful sensuality of his child's feelings for life and the natural world around him.

"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 the big city, he revealed, with brilliant insight, the deep and driving forces of our culture: here are America"s restless idealism, her glamorous material seductions, her basic spiritual innocence.

Sister Carrie brought American literature into the twentieth century. This volume, which reprints the text Dreiser approved for publication during his lifetime and includes a special appendix discussing his earlier, unedited manuscript version, is the original standard edition of one of the great masterpieces of literary realism.