A country girl moves to the big city and lives her own version of the American Dream by becoming mistress to the men of her choice and so working her way to fame as an actress.

Sinclair Lewis said of the novel in 1930, "Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman."