This Norton Critical Edition features the 1900 Doubleday Page text of the novel. "Backgrounds and Sources" reprints excerpts from Dreiser's autobiographies, and a documentary account, drawn largely from Dreiser's correspondence with Frank Norris, Arthur Henry, Walter H.Page and F.N.Doubleday, discusses the supposed "suppression" of Sister Carrie by its first publisher. "Criticism" includes twelve essays that seek to identify Dreiser's literary naturalism in "Sister Carrie", the sources of fictional strength in the novel and the novel's relationship to American life. New to the second edition are essays by Ellen Moers, Robert Penn Warren, Philip Fisher, Robert Shulman and Donald Pizer.