Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser

Country girl Carrie Meeber comes to Chicago and rises to fame as a stage actress through relationships with men, while the men who help her descend. Dreiser's debut novel was suppressed by its own publisher, Doubleday, in 1900 after only 1,008 copies were printed, because the wife of publisher Frank Doubleday found it immoral — the first major instance of a publisher suppressing its own book for content.