Sister Carrie (The Heritage Press)

xi, [1], 387 pp. Tall 8vo. Original red and white cloth, line illustration on front cover, black titles. Introduction by Burton Rascoe, illustration by Reginald Marsh. Theodore Dreiser had a hardscrabble youth and the years of newspaper work behind him when he began his first novel, Sister Carrie, the story of a beautiful Midwestern girl who makes it big in New York City. Published by Doubleday in 1900, it gained a reputation as a shocker, for Dreiser had dared to give the public a heroine whose 'cosmopolitan standard of virtue' brings her from Wisconsin, with four dollars in her purse, to a suite at the Waldorf and glittering fame as an actress. With Sister Carrie, the original manuscript of which is in the New York Public Library collections, Dreiser told a tale not 'sufficiently delicate' for many of its first readers and critics, but which is now universally recognized as one of the greatest and most influential American novels.