The late Steve Jobs in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University eloquently traced the imprint of a calligraphy course he had taken at Reed College years earlier leading up to the creation of today's world standard in computer-aided typography. The esteemed architect Frank Gehry can trace the imprint of his undergraduate work working in a museum to his current success, and furthermore he can trace the imprint of a different work of art in each of the buildings he created. President Bill Clinton can trace the imprint left by witnessing Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 “I have a Dream” speech to his decision to dedicate his life to politics. However, in regards to the novelist and tracing the imprint of his work, it seems that the dominant voice that echoes through the pages of his novel is life experience. Two such novels that draw their imprint from life experience are Sister Carrie by former journalist Theodore Dreiser and The Day of the Locust by screenwriter Nathanael West. Obviously Sister Carrie shares the topic with the newspaper. As is known, the model for Sister Carrie's protagonist is Dreiser's sister Emma, ​​​​who fled from Chicago to New York with her married lover after he stole money from the saloon where she worked. Dreiser based the character of Sister Carrie on family experience, but the novel's origins are journalistic as well as personal. The entire New York section of Sister Carrie, with its dual emphasis on the glamorous world of the theater and the miserable existence of the Tramp, mirrors the real stories of both Broadway and Bowery newspapers. Men similar to Hurstwood in his downward spiral could easily be found in newspapers. Dreiser might have written an article about a trap that, like… middle of paper… boring, drudgery work,” West writes of the transplanted Midwest, “Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize they have been deceived and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read newspapers and went to the movies. Both have fed them lynchings, murders, sex crimes, explosions, shipwrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars… They have been deceived and betrayed” (West 177-178). The riot at the gala premiere at the end of the novel is their revenge on the false promises of cinema. Two very different stories written by men who let their life experience leave an imprint through the pages of their novels. Theodore Dreiser with the traces of the journalist's who, what, where, when and why and Nathanael West with the traces of the screenwriter's editing and dialogue - both leave their inexhaustible imprint as novelists.