Sister Carrie

By 1900, when Dreiser published Sister Carrie, the United States had already produced a generation of historical novelists. These pioneering authors, among them Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving, recreated earlier eras within the American experience, bringing to their contemporary audience a vivid sense of America’s historical roots.

Theodore Dreiser, along with other realist novelists of his era including Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Stephen Crane, represented a different take on the novel by casting a careful eye on their own era. As a realist novelist, Dreiser records the sights, sounds, and smells of the city. as well as the deplorable conditions of Chicago’s and New York’s working-class neighborhoods and the seamy underworld of New York’s saloons and theaters.

Although it captures with voluminous detail and journalistic verisimilitude turn-of-the-century Chicago (Dreiser was working as a journalist in Chicago), Sister Carrie is also an exercise in psychological storytelling. With the diligence of a scientist, Dreiser uses characters to test how people react to those specific conditions that define an era. In this case, Dreiser explores how money affects ordinary people in an era in which America had a growing and influential upper class.