Sister Carrie
A young woman arrives in Chicago with a suitcase and four dollars, and the novel follows what she is willing to do to stay. Dreiser based the book on his sister's experience and wrote it in a flat, reportorial prose that was new in American fiction.
The book is often described as naturalist, meaning that its characters are shaped by forces they cannot control. That is true, but Dreiser is also interested in desire, and Carrie's rise is not presented as a fall. The publishing history is part of the story: the novel was nearly suppressed by its own publisher.
Public-domain status
First published in 1900. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Theodore Dreiser died in 1945, so this work has been free to republish there since 2016.
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Keep reading
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