In the following essay, Bucco presents an overview of Sister Carrie.

In Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser went beyond the Hoosier romanticism of Meredith Nicholson's "Alice of Old Vincennes" (1900) and the genteel realism of Booth Tarkington's The Gentleman from Indiana (1899). Growing up poor in Indiana, the day dreamy Dreiser envied the escape to the metropolis of his older brothers and sisters. Later, he drifted from one newspaper to another—Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh. Charged with Balzac's Come-die humaine, Herbert Spencer's First Principles, and his own vivid memories, Dreiser began Sister Carrie in New York in 1899. The author based his first novel partly on his sister, Emma, who in 1886 had fled from the law with a saloon clerk. Because of the novel's sexual frankness, Dreiser's own publisher (Doubleday Page) did not promote it; but the senior reader, the writer Frank Norris, zealously sent out review copies. WhenB.W. Dodge...