Sister Carrie  

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Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel by Theodore Dreiser about a young country girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream by first becoming a mistress to powerful men and later as a famous actress.

At the time of its first publication, the novel caused a minor scandal and Dreiser had difficulty finding a publisher for it. This was due to the blurred division line between good and bad in the plot. Although Dreiser's moralizing narrator does assert that, despite the fame and the money she has amassed, Carrie will not be able to achieve peace of mind in her life, the apparent lack of poetic justice -- the notion that immorality should pay in the end, even if only up to a point -- was a concept the reading public were altogether unused to at the time.

Written after Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary -- two adulterous heroines who commit suicide at the end of the novel -- Dreiser was accused of immorality because he didn’t make his heroine kill herself at the end of the book. In a twist, this is the fate he gives to the man.

Literary significance & criticism

In his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1930, Sinclair Lewis said that "Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, 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".

Film

Laurence Olivier and Jennifer Jones starred in the 1952 film version, Carrie, directed by William Wyler.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Sister Carrie" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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