The story of the vicissitudes attendant upon the publisher's suppression, in 1901, of Sister Carrie is the history of America's emergence from the fog of suspicion and fear of realism in the novel. On the score of his uncompromising fight, Theodore Dreiser must be regarded a pioneer and liberator. His Sister Carrie pointed the tendency in American fiction for twenty-five years, and today it remains a monumental achievement, embodying all the sympathy, tenderness and unremitting naturalness for which its author has grown internationally famous.