The year before Carrie hit the theaters, George Stevens premiered his successful adaptation of a Dreiser novel with the celebrated A Place in the Sun (1951), based on An American Tragedy (1925); it featured superstars Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. Director Josef von Sternberg had made the first film version of An American Tragedy in 1931.
Comments and Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Sister Carrie through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
THEODORE DREISER
Well, the critics have not really understood what I was trying to do. Here is a book that is close to life. It is intended not as a piece of literary craftsmanship, but as a picture of conditions done as simply and effectively as the English language will permit. To sit up and criticise me for saying “vest,” instead of “waistcoat”; to talk about my splitting the infinitive and using vulgar commonplaces here and there, when the tragedy of a man’s life is being displayed, is silly. More, it is ridiculous. It makes me feel that American criticism is the joke which English literary authorities maintain it to be. But the circulation is beginning to boom. When it gets to the people they will understand, because it is a story of real life, of their lives.
—from the New York imes (January 15, 1901)
DENVER REPUBLICAN
The chief merit of [Sister Carrie] is its photographic descriptions of character. Scenes and incidents are freely localized. The book is unhealthful in tone, however, and its literary quality is not high enough to cover its faults of theme. -January 20, 1901
—January 20, 1901
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
The philosophy of [Sister Carrie] is very clear and very interesting. Its incidents, the squalid plane upon which its development takes place, will naturally prevent it from achieving a marked popularity. Even Mr. Dreiser’s antiseptic style cannot make it anything but a most unpleasant tale, and you would never dream of recommending it to another person to read.
—January 20, 1901
LONDON DAILY MAIL
At last a really strong novel has come from America; a novel almost great because of its relentless purpose, its power to compel emotion, its marvellous simplicity. If Mr. Theodore Dreiser obtains the success he deserves, then “Sister Carrie” should make the book not of one but of many seasons.
—August 13, 1901
MANCHESTER GUARDIAN
Rarely, even in modern work, have we met with characters so little idealised, so patiently presented. There is nothing of the showy development of the worse kind of psychological novel ... Mr. Dreiser impresses us by his truthful sequence of events. He is strictly normal, and no fantastic light is shed on the credible steps of vice and crime. He is a faithful student, but his eyes are not fixed dully on the model. He might be called unimaginative by those who see no imagination in the insight which makes its deductions from experience nor in that illuminating intelligence which controls a design.... The effect of the whole is perhaps a little depressing, and Mr. Dreiser has not much charm of style. He has many happy phrases, but we are occasionally oppressed by such “Americanisms” as “eyes snapping” or “when he went home evenings the house looked nice.” His work is faithful, acute, unprejudiced, and it should belong to the veritable “documents” of American history.
—August 14, 1901
THE ACADEMY
Sister Carrie has opened our eyes. It is a calm, reasoned, realistic study of American life in Chicago and New York, absolutely free from the slightest trace of sentimentality or prettiness, and dominated everywhere by a serious and strenuous desire for truth.
—August 24, 1901
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
Throughout [Sister Carrie] the phrasing is of the streets and bars—colloquial, familiar, vivid, slangy, unlovely, but intensely real. Of the manner of the book it is not easy to speak favourably; it is strikingly unworthy of the matter thereof. Whilst large, dignified, and generous, the scheme of the story here told is not pretentious, or complex, or ambitious. It is a very plain tale of a plain though eventful life. Between its covers no single note of unreality is struck. It is untrammelled by any single concession to convention or tradition, literary or social. It is as compact of actuality as a police-court record, and throughout its pages one feels pulsing the sturdy, restless energy of a young people, a cosmopolitan community, a nation busy upon the hither side of maturity. The book is, firstly, the full, exhaustive story of the “half-equipped little knight’s” life and adventures; secondly, it is a broad, vivid picture of men and manners in middle-class New York and Chicago; and, thirdly, it is a thorough and really masterly study of the moral, physical, and social deterioration of one Hurstwood, a lover of the heroine. Upon all these counts it is a creditable piece of work, faithful and real in the interest which pertains to genuinely realistic fiction. It is further of interest by reason that it strikes a key-note and is typical, both in the faults of its manner and in the wealth and diversity of its matter, of the great country which gave it birth.
—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.