Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie is a novel by the American writer Theodore Dreiser, published in 1900. It has been called the greatest of all American urban novels.

It is late 1889, and eighteen-year-old Caroline Meeber, known to her family as Sister Carrie, is dissatisfied with her life in Columbia County, Wisconsin. She takes the train to Chicago to live with her older sister, Minnie Hanson, and Minnie's husband. On the journey she meets Charles Drouet, a travelling salesman who is attracted to her simple beauty and unspoiled manner, and the two of them exchange contact details.

Carrie finds the atmosphere at her sister's flat to be, in the novel's words, a steady round of toil, so she writes to Drouet and tells him not to call on her there. She takes a job running a machine in a shoe factory and hands most of her meagre wages to the Hansons for room and board.

When an illness costs her the job, she encounters Drouet again, and he persuades her to leave the dull and constricted life she has been living and move in with him. To press his case he slips her two ten-dollar bills, which opens up what the book describes as a vista of material possibilities, and the novel follows what the city makes of Carrie and what she makes of it.