Sister Carrie: A Novel

About the book

Carrie Meeber comes to Chicago with limited money and an expectation that city life may offer more than the world she has left. The realities of employment and housing soon place those hopes under pressure. Relationships with the salesman Drouet and the manager Hurstwood connect personal attraction with comfort, opportunity, and unequal resources. As the narrative moves towards New York and the theatre, changing circumstances alter the balance between people who once seemed securely placed. Dreiser attends closely to clothes, rooms, wages, streets, and the persuasive force of what others possess. His account treats aspiration as something continually stimulated by the urban environment. The novel asks what success can satisfy when desire has learned to renew itself through comparison, and when an improved position does not necessarily produce an understood purpose.

• Urban aspiration
• Money and dependence
• Desire and satisfaction

Why read it

For a detailed account of city life in which material circumstances and continually changing desires shape intimate decisions.

Novel · English text