Sister Carrie is the fictional complement to Thorstein Veblen’s sociological classic The Theory of the Leisure Class and the American cousin of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

There is a clear-cut autobiographical basis to these attitudes. Dreiser’s childhood and young manhood schooled and scarred him. He was born in 1871, in Terre Haute, Indiana, into a large impoverished family. His father, a German Catholic, was barely able to scrape together a living, so that his pious Mennonite mother took in washing. It was not uncommon for the children to go to bed hungry. Theodore was a shy, repressed child who spent hours reading or, like Carrie, whiling away time daydreaming. His four older sisters and two brothers all rebelled against the puritanical morality of the Dreiser household. Without moral qualms, the sisters traded sex for fashionable clothes, jewels, and creature comforts—all the traditional perquisites of status. In fact, the plot of Sister Carrie is closely modeled on the love life of one of those sisters, Emma, who eloped with tavern manager E. A. Hopkins. (Dreiser’s 1911 novel Jennie Gerhardt centered on the life of another sister, Mary Frances, “Mame.”). His brother Paul changed his last name to Dresser and became the celebrated songwriter of “By the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away” and other popular ditties—and a successful lady’s man.

Theodore, by contrast, patched together a ragged education, attending public schools, where he did not distinguish himself as a student, and, for one wasted year, Indiana University before dropping out. Sex obsessed and tortured him. For a few years he knocked about, supporting himself with odd jobs until he finally found a vocation as a journalist, a major turning point in his life. His stint as a reporter on newspapers in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis honed his writing skills and gave him a daily front-row seat to witness—and to reflect on—the casualties of social turmoil. He covered the bitterly violent tram strike in Akron, Ohio, and sympathized with the plight of the exploited workers and their families who fought the intransigent corporations, Pinkerton guards, and scabs so desperate for work they would risk their lives for a paltry few dollars.

Dreiser’s beat ranged far and wide. He prowled city streets and ethnic neighborhoods in search of human-interest stories, talking to prostitutes, maids, clerks, actors, doctors, teachers, and people who bought furniture on the installment plan. He interviewed ruthless financiers whose meteoric rise was due to an aggressive will, a monomaniacal ego, and an eye for the main chance—men who did not shy away from resorting to bribery or other corrupt practices in order to acquire and wield power. Chicago’s economic and social stratifications were as familiar to Dreiser as his own hands.

America, Sister Carrie suggests, is a divided nation. The residents already inside “the walled city” are dominated by the moneyed class. They flaunt their wealth like peacocks and dine in ornate restaurants (Dreiser despised the “unwholesome,” gargantuan meals, “enough to feed an army,” devoured in these elegant culinary palaces). Next in importance are the politicians who control patronage, dole out jobs for their needy constituents, and line their own pockets with graft. And then come the celebrities whose pictures adorn theater posters and the rotogravure sections of Sunday newspapers. Dreiser likens the powerful and rich to whales, lords of the sea. “A common fish must needs disappear wholly from view—remain unseen” (p. 260). Carrie’s almost blind instinct helps her to avert this hapless destiny. Instead, it is Hurstwood who drowns in that sea.

On nearly every page of the novel, Dreiser evokes the spell wealth casts on his characters.