Sister Carrie

The novel follows Caroline 'Carrie' Meeber, an impressionable country girl who moves from rural Wisconsin to Chicago in search of a better life. After struggling with low-paying factory work, she is drawn into relationships with two men: Charles Drouet, a charming traveling salesman, and later George Hurstwood, a married, wealthy saloon manager. Hurstwood’s affair with Carrie leads him to embezzle money from his employer, and he flees with her to New York, where their fortunes reverse. As Hurstwood descends into poverty and despair, eventually committing suicide, Carrie's ambition and talent are realized, and she rises to fame as a successful actress on the New York stage under the name Carrie Madenda. Dreiser's work explores themes of ambition, materialism, the social consequences of the American Dream, and the moral ambiguities of life in the rapidly changing urban landscape of the early 20th century.

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