Sister Carrie

"This is really the converse of most of the things I have been talking about here. Carrie is a very beautiful woman who came from Wisconsin. Some people thought this was a book about nuns, but it wasn’t. There is no nun-like behaviour in the book at all. Quite the reverse! Carrie goes to Chicago and falls in with a swell [a dandy]. He takes her on as his mistress, and her life is tremendously up and down. She has an affair with a man who is married, and is then taken to New York and lives in Lower Manhattan with a man who ultimately treats her badly. But she is determined to succeed, and makes it as a well-known starlet in up-market theatrical performances, while her lover declines to beggary. She ultimately leaves him and gives him $20, – the same sum, ironically, that she was given on her first date with the swell in Chicago. So this is an urban story which is gritty and shows real life. As a consequence of that it was frowned upon hugely at the time it was published, and as you mentioned it was heavily censored. But now it is regarded as a classic of early American modernist literature."