—from The Athenaeum (September 7, 1901)

NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW

Theodore Dreiser’s frankly realistic story called “Sister Carrie,” originally published seven years ago, is now published by Messrs. B. W. Dodge & Co., and deserves to be received as a new book, for it did not get a chance for recognition when it first appeared....

To an extraordinary degree the book is a photograph of conditions in the crude larger cities of America and of the people who make these conditions and are made by them. There is no attempt to complicate the facts as they are with notions of things as they should be morally, or as they might be sentimentally or aesthetically. People’s feelings are not considered. The author is quite impersonal. Withal, the story is interesting in spite of the commonplace character of the personages and the low plane of the gallery in which they move.... It may be added that the story even upon its first publication seven years ago attracted much attention and won favorable recognition in England. We do not, however, recommend the book to the fastidious reader, or the one who clings to “old-fashioned ideas.” It is a book one can very well get along without reading.

—May 25, 1907

SAN FRANCISCO ARGONAUT

When she eventually leaves Drouet and allows herself not quite unwillingly to be abducted by Hurstwood, a special scarlet label will describe the book as an immoral one, quite unsuited to the perusal of the young person and the boarding-school miss. But these critics will have little to say in condemnation of the immorality of a commercial system which offers young girls a wage of three or four dollars a week in payment for labor as destructive to the mind as to the body.

—August 3, 1907

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost forever is personified in [Dreiser].

—from Little Review (April 1916)

H. L. MENCKEN

[Dreiser’s] aim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thing he exposes is not the empty event and act, but the endless mystery out of which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in them that is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in “Pot-Bouille”—in Nietzsche’s phrase, for “the delight to stink”—then surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been underestimated....

His books remain, particularly his earlier books—and not all the ranting of the outraged orthodox will ever wipe them out. They were done in the stage of wonder, before self-consciousness began to creep in and corrupt it. The view of life that got into “Sister Carrie,” the first of them, was not the product of deliberate thinking out of Carrie’s problem. It simply got itself there by the force of the artistic passion behind it; its coherent statement had to wait for other and more reflective days. This complete rejection of ethical plan and purpose, this manifestation of what Nietzsche used to call moral innocence, is what brought up the guardians of the national tradition at the gallop, and created the Dreiser bugaboo of today. All the rubber-stamp formulae of American fiction were thrown overboard in these earlier books; instead of reducing the inexplicable to the obvious, they lifted the obvious to the inexplicable; one could find in them no orderly chain of causes and effects, of rewards and punishments; they represented life as a phenomenon at once terrible and unintelligible, like a stroke of lightning. The prevailing criticism applied the moral litmus. They were not “good”; ergo, they were “evil.”

—from Seven Arts (August 1917)

SINCLAIR LEWIS

Now to me, as to many other American writers, Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life.

—from “The American Fear of Literature” (1930)

FORD MADOX FORD

And Dreiser has the gift of universality.... If you like to call it Americanness you can—in the sense that a sort of uniform spirit has overrun the Western world so that they are eating nearly as many and nearly as filthy indigestible canned products in Paris and London today as they are in Chicago.

—from Portraits From Life (1937)

MALCOLM COWLEY

Sister Carrie had the appearance of being a naturalistic novel and would be used as a model for the work of later naturalists. Yet it was, in a sense, naturalistic by default, naturalistic because Dreiser was writing about the life he knew best in the only style he had learned. There is a personal and compulsive quality in the book that is not at all naturalistic. The book is felt rather than observed from the outside, like McTeague; and it is based on dreams rather than documents. Where McTeague had been a conducted tour of the depths, Sister Carrie was a cry from the depths, as if McTeague had uttered it.

—from New Republic (June 23, 1947)

LIONEL TRILLING

Mr. Hicks knows that Dreiser is “clumsy” and “stupid” and “bewildered” and “crude in his statement of materialistic monism”; he knows that Dreiser in his personal life—which is in point because [Henry] James’s personal life is always supposed to be so much in point—was not quite emancipated from “his boyhood longing for crass material success,” showing “again and again a desire for the ostentatious luxury of the successful business man.” But Dreiser is to be accepted and forgiven because his faults are the sad, lovable, honorable faults of reality itself, or of America itself—huge, inchoate, struggling toward expression, caught between the dream of raw power and the dream of morality.

—from The Liberal Imagination (1950)

SAUL BELLOW

I often think the criticisms of Dreiser as a stylist at times betray a resistance to the feelings he causes readers to suffer. If they can say that he can’t write, they need not experience these feelings.

—from Commentary (May 1951)

ROBERT PENN WARREN

Sister Carrie was different from anything by [William Dean] Howells or [Frank] Norris. What was shocking here was not only Dreiser’s unashamed willingness to identify himself with morally undifferentiated experience or his failure to punish vice and reward virtue in his fiction, but the implication that vice and virtue might, in themselves, be mere accidents, mere irrelevances in this process of human life, and that the world was a great machine, morally indifferent. Ultimately, what shocked the world in Dreiser’s work was not so much the things that he presented as the fact that he himself was not shocked by them.

—from Homage to Theodore Dreiser (1971)

Question

1. Does Dreiser imply or describe an underlying cause for the economic disparities described in Sister Carrie— something beyond individual fear and desire, something systematic? Does Dreiser imply or advocate a cure for these economic problems? If he offers no solution, does that diminish the power of his description or his criticism?

2. If you were a good friend of Carrie’s, someone who could speak to her frankly, what advice would you give her?