The driving forces of our culture -- restless idealism, glamorous material seductions and spiritual innocence -- are revealed in Dreiser`s transformation of the conventional "fallen woman" story into a genuinely original work of imaginative fiction. 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. `American writing, before and after Dreiser`s time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin,` said H. L. Mencken. Sister Carrie, Dreiser`s great first novel, transformed the conventional `fallen woman` story into a bold and truly innovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900.