He begins a relationship with actress Helen Richardson, his cousin, and moves to Hollywood with her. Sherwood Anderson publishes Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of interconnected stories. Booth Tarkington wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Magnificent Ambersons. 

1920   F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes This Side of Paradise. Dreiser publishes a collection of philosophical sketches titled Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub. Sinclair Lewis publishes Main Street. Playwright Eugene O’Neill wins the Pulitzer Prize for his drama Beyond the Horizon.  Congress passes the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote.
1922   Dreiser publishes a second memoir, A Book About Myself, on his newspaper days. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land appears. Ulysses,  the avant-garde novel by James Joyce, is published but is burned by the U.S. Post Office. The American stock market takes off, giving rise to the nickname “The Roaring Twenties” for this high-flying decade.
1923   Dreiser publishes The Color of a Great City, a paean to New York. Sigmund Freud publishes The Ego and the Id. 
1925  An American Tragedy is published. Based on the actual murder of Grace Brown and the subsequent trial of Chester Gillette, the novel is Dreiser’s first major success. American novelist John Dos Passos publishes Manhattan Transfer.  Biology teacher John Scopes is convicted of violating Tennessee state law by teaching evolution in public school. Bell Telephone Laboratories is founded.
1926  Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed,  an unremarkable book of Dreiser’s verse, appears
1927   At the invitation of the Soviet government, Dreiser goes to Moscow for the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Virginia Woolf publishes To The Light-house. The Jazz Singer,  starring Al Jolson, introduces talking motion pictures.
1928  Dreiser Looks at Russia,  an account of Dreiser’s visit to the Soviet Union, is published.
1929   Dreiser publishes A Gallery of Women, a two-volume collection of fifteen fictionalized profiles of women he has either known or wants to celebrate. The American stock market collapses, initiating the Great Depression. Thomas Wolfe publishes Look Homeward Angel.  By observing distant galaxies, Edwin Hubble determines that the universe is expanding.
1931   Dreiser publishes the anti-capitalist treatise Tragic America and a memoir titled Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth. He delivers a speech at New York’s Town Hall characterizing the Alabama rape trial of the Scottsboro boys as legal lynching. Josef von Sternberg’s film version of An American Tragedy opens. Robert Frost’s Collected Poems  wins the Pulitzer Prize. The Empire State Building, the tallest skyscraper ever built, opens.
1938   Dreiser settles in California permanently with Helen Richardson. 
1939   World War II breaks out in Europe. John Steinbeck publishes The Grapes of Wrath. Film classics Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz  premiere.
1941   The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into World War II. 
1942   Sara White Dreiser dies after thirty years of separation from her husband. 
1944   Dreiser marries his longtime companion Helen Richardson. Tennessee Williams debuts his play The Glass Menagerie  on Broadway. On June 6 U.S. forces land at Normandy.
1945   After joining the Communist Party early in the year, Theodore Dreiser dies on December 28, in Hollywood, California. Richard Wright publishes Black Boy.  The United States drops atomic bombs on Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Europe, World War II ends on May 8.
1946  The Bulwark  is published.
1947  The Stoic, the last novel in Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Desire,” is published. A collection of Dreiser’s short fiction, The Best Short Stories,  is published.
1951  A Place in the Sun, a film adaptation of An American Tragedy,  starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, opens.
1952   William Wyler’s film Carrie  opens, starring Laurence Olivier as Hurstwood, Jennifer Jones as Carrie, and Eddie Albert as Drouet.

Introduction

Since its publication in 1900, Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, has incited two kinds of controversy: moral and artistic. When Dreiser submitted his book to the respectable publishing firm of Doubleday, Page and Co., it was initially met with enthusiasm. Serving as a reader, the novelist Frank Norris strongly recommended that the book be acquired.