Sister Carrie

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 embarking on a life of sin rather than by hard work and perseverance.

Related Topics:
1900 - Theodore Dreiser - American Dream

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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 and the fact that, at the end, Carrie is rewarded rather than punished for her immoral life. Although Dreiser's moralising 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.

Related Topics:
Narrator - Poetic justice

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