Sister Carrie

Caroline Meeber leaves a small Wisconsin town for Chicago with a cheap satchel and four dollars, meaning to make her way. When factory work fails her, she drifts into the keeping of Drouet, a genial travelling salesman, and then of Hurstwood, the prosperous, married manager of a fashionable saloon, who ruins himself for her and carries her off to New York.

There the two lives begin to move in opposite directions. Carrie, almost without trying, finds the stage and rises — chorus, small parts, then a name in lights and a suite in a good hotel. Hurstwood, cut off from the only world in which he knew how to be somebody, sinks through idleness and shabbiness to the breadline and at last to a cheap lodging-house room. The same appetites that lift one of them destroy the other, and the novel finds no justice anywhere in the arrangement.

First published in 1900 — and so disliked by its own publisher that it was printed without promotion and sold only a few hundred copies — Sister Carrie is now recognized as one of the foundations of modern American fiction. In Dreiser’s heavy, patient, documentary prose, it is a great novel of consumer desire and the modern city, of determinism and chance, and of a longing that wealth and fame can never satisfy. Carrie wins everything she set out for and ends rocking alone by her window, dreaming of a happiness she will never feel.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition, suppression, and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.