Small works

"Sister Carrie" is a remarkable first novel, Dreiser,... broke into the stale atmosphere of the bourgeois of America as the wild West wind and for the first time since Mark TWAIN and Whitman made a breath of fresh air to our suffocating little world of home". So in 1930 in his Nobel prize acceptance speech praised novel by American writer Sinclair Lewis, stressing that the premium was to get Theodore Dreiser, because he "liberated American literature from Victorian timidity and sent her on the path of courageous, honest and passionate picture of life." Published in 1900, Dreiser's debut novel caused a huge scandal - it was called immoral, godless, cynical and discrediting the American dream. A well-known critic wrote that "to praise this novel almost as dangerous to shoot the President." Next novel - "Jenny Gerhardt" - Dreiser began to write immediately after the first, but ten years passed before the book was published. In the work of the great American realist and student of human nature, these two novels stand out as the most emotional and poetic. Complement the present volume of selected works of short stories published in 1918-1919. They will allow a fuller assessment of large-scale talent of the writer, which is the already mentioned critic said: "American literature before and after Dreiser differs almost as much as biology before and after Darwin".