Sister Carrie

A country girl arrives in Chicago, becomes first a mistress and then a stage success, and the man who ruined himself for her goes down as she rises. Doubleday printed it in 1900 and then refused to advertise it, the publisher's wife having found it immoral; it sold under five hundred copies and is now the first modern American novel. Fifty plates by George Bellows and John Sloan carry the city's grit and glare alongside Dreiser's story of a girl on the make.