Rating: 
Summary: Bright Lights, Big City
Review: Dreiser is best known for "An American Tragedy," which to my taste is one of the most boring books ever written. But Sister Carrie is a classic in the best sense of the word. Dreiser draws the reader back in time to turn of the century America, and immerses him completely in the hopes, fears, desires, and mores of that lost time. The now fading archetype of the travelling salesman as the dangerously seductive dandy despoiling virtuous young women comes to life here. Sound corny? Not in the least. Because Dreiser gets inside these people's heads, and they're just as interesting as anyone gracing the pages of People Magazine. The novel starts with a timeless theme, young girl goes to the big city and gets seduced by smooth travelling salesman. Every made for TV movie variation on this theme nowadays reduces this to a morality tale to warn young viewers. Not Dreiser. He turns this into what I'd argue is one of the first and least politically tainted feminist novels of the 20th century. Buy this book. It'll cost you half of the newest John Grisham or Stephen King novel, you'll be solidly entertained with page turning excitement, and you can brag to all your friends about the classic you just finished.
Rating:
Summary: Not so fallen woman . . .
Review: SISTER CARRIE is a traditional fallen woman story in that her vanity and ambition serves as her "down fall." Instead of her declining into abject misery like so many of the others, Carrie acheives her goal of becoming an actress. The "fallen" part comes into play where fame and wealth isn't quite what she had thought it would be. It's a well written book about ambition that takes a new twist with a fallen heroine.
Rating:
Summary: Emotional, Powerful, Epic, Amazing
Review: In my opinion, there is no american author (with the exception of Steinbeck) who can create such powerfully moving stories like Theodore Dreiser. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser tells the tale of a girl who is disenchanted with her small town life, so she moves to Chicago in search of bigger and better things. The story is an amazing portrayal of a woman's life at the beginning of the twentieth century. Dreiser, through his characters, shows the difficulty of living as a single female trying to earn a living as well as maintain relationships. Throughout the book there seems to be a rather dark, somber mood, as if there is always an internal struggle and the dire need to improve one's life, but never achieving the goal. The romance, heartbreak, emotion, and power that are portrayed through the characters and their struggles are combined masterfully to make Sister Carrie one of the best works of fiction ever penned.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully depressing
Review: Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" is a complex novel of linear events. It is a study in cause and effect -- how a character's environment, or change of environment, affects his or her values, especially with regard to money and the iniquity it brings. 18-year-old Caroline "Carrie" Meeber, bored with her life in a small Wisconsin town, comes to Chicago in 1889 to live with her sister Minnie. The only employment she can get is a laborious, low-paying job in a shoe factory, and when she loses it and wears out her welcome with her sister's family, a well-to-do young man named Charles Drouet, whom she met on the train to Chicago, sets her up in an apartment where they pretend to be married. Drouet has a friend named George Hurstwood, a man in his late thirties and the manager at a local upscale bar. Hurstwood's home life is stagnant and empty; he has a self-centered wife whom he ceased loving long ago and two materialistic children around Carrie's age. He is going through what many decades later would be called a midlife crisis. Through Drouet, Hurstwood meets Carrie and they form a mutual attraction. Unlike Drouet, to whom life is all about social status, Hurstwood does not patronize Carrie; he makes her feel intelligent and important, and Carrie exhibits Hurstwood's ideals of youth and beauty. When Hurstwood's wife gets wise to her husband's affair and sues him for divorce, Hurstwood succumbs to the temptation to steal money from his employer and tricks Carrie into leaving Chicago with him. They go to New York and experience curious reversals of fortune -- Carrie becomes a rich and famous showgirl while Hurstwood drifts into inescapable poverty and a bitter end. This is no Cinderella story for Carrie. It may seem like she is being rewarded for her innocence and integrity, but since she realizes that her success is more the result of luck than talent, her new life is not as fulfilling as she thought it might be. I found myself surprisingly engaged by the story because Dreiser presents his characters as real people with unsolvable problems and doesn't try to teach a morality lesson. I finished the novel feeling miserable about the world, which is not something that many novels can do to me. My only complaint is that Dreiser's prose is a little awkward and excessively wordy without the benefit of clarity; it longs for the smoother touch of D.H. Lawrence or Somerset Maugham.
Rating: 
Summary: The Powerful Work of Theodore Dreiser
Review: Dreiser describes the psyche and actions of Carrie Meeber, a young woman trying to succeed in the late nineteenth century in America, and others she meets to show the struggle of young women trying to succeed in the newly industrialized America. When Dreiser first published Sister Carrie, his publisher censored the book due to its shocking content. Dreiser unfortunately has a tendency to ramble about some topics. Although Dreiser uses lengthy descriptions at times, he still manages to get across the horrible injustices that befell many Americans during this time. The book seems to revolve around chance. Although Dreiser shows the inevitability in the characters' lives and that everything led to death, he also shows that much of the events occurred by chance. The characters meet each other by chance, and the events that lead to Carrie's downfall happened by chance. Dreiser shows the world he lived in to the reader. Everything in the book is not random chance. It accurately displays life at that time in America. Dreiser took his story from Horatio Alger. Alger told of virtuous and ambitious men, however. Dreiser took a woman and allowed her to succeed. This added to the shock value of the novel. Another novel of shock value during this industrialization period is The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. This novel showed the horrors of the meat-packing industry. Sister Carrie spent some time exploiting sweat shops although that was not the primary focus of the novel. However, if one likes Sister Carrie, The Jungle would be a good book to read to learn more of the lives of the working class during the industrialization period in American history.
Rating: 
Summary: Money and manners, à la Dreiser
Review: "Sister Carrie", first published 100 years ago, is Theodore Dreiser's ironic story of the acquisition and loss of wealth in a country devoted to commerce and pleasure. No one ever accused Dreiser of being sparkling -- one of my reference books calls him "ponderous" -- but he had the strength of his convictions, and he was convinced that American materialism was the root of American unhappiness. Caroline Meeber is a country mouse who, coming to Chicago in search of work, is pounced upon by big-city cats, including a flashy traveling salesman straight out of back-room jokes. When Charles Drouet seduces Carrie, it seems more like he's adopting a pet, she's so innocently compliant. And when she becomes involved with his friend George Hurstwood, it seems incredible she doesn't suspect that this middle-aged affluent man is probably married (or that Drouet doesn't reveal it to her long before he does). It is Hurstwood's abandonment of his family and embezzlement from his employers that is the plot's turning point. With his stolen money, Hurstwood and Carrie escape to New York, he to ultimate destitution, she to stardom on the stage. All this is interesting but terribly dry, like flowers pressed in a book. The main problem in "Sister Carrie" is Carrie herself, who's such a passive character it's difficult to feel much for her. Even her success in the theatre seems to just sort of happen. (But, a reader may ask, if Carrie is so boring, how does she become a popular star? Well, turn on prime time TV for ten minutes and there's your answer.) Of course, there is no guarantee that Carrie's alluring situation is going to last -- I kept thinking of Evelyn Nesbit Thaw -- and Dreiser only hints at the fine line between stage work and prostitution a century ago. "Sister Carrie" is worth reading because it's a serious novel of life in a dichotomous society. Dreiser details with equal skill the drudgery of daily toil (not to mention the search for daily toil) and the glittering pursuits of those who can afford Michigan Boulevard and Fifth Avenue. If his style seems a little -- well, ponderous -- it should be remembered he was writing strictly from the brain. Dreiser really seemed to have no warm sympathy for the vagaries of capitalism.
Rating:
Summary: great read
Review: This was one of the most absorbing classic works I've read in a long time. Dreiser artfully tells of the rise and fall of two of the novels central characters The contrast of each characters very different beginnings and subsequent rise and demise of each is quite fascinating. The novel is written in very simple and straightforward language which is a departure from the more wordy and heady classics that I've begun to tackle. A real gem of a novel. Read it.
Rating: 
Summary: I hated this book
Review: I was taking a class in HS that was called Chicago Lit/Contempory Novels, and for the Chicago Lit part of it, this is one of the books we read. I found this book to be extremely dull, and could not force myself to finish it. This was the feeling that the entire class had, and so after reading about half of it, the teacher gave up, and we switched to another book.
Rating:
Summary: twaddle
Review: Theodore Dreiser is considered to be the leading American practitioner of Naturalism--which consists of writing about sex and violence in the lower classes in order to reveal what I gather were supposed to be shattering truths about the bleak aspects of modern industrial urban life. To that end, Sister Carrie tells the story of a pretty small town girl who uses her feminine wiles to sleep her way from the factories and saloons of Chicago to the New York stage. Along the way, the tavern owning married man who stole to fund their escape to Chicago, kills himself after being abandoned by Carrie and ending up in Bowery flophouses. Meanwhile, An American Tragedy tells the story, based on a sensational true crime, of a young man who is working his way towards the American dream and refuses to let a pregnant former girlfriend stand in the way of his chance for romance with a wealthy woman. He takes the slattern out in a boat & clobbers her, but is tried and executed for the crime. It is an open secret that even critics who admire Dreiser, consider him to be a horrible writer technically. American Tragedy has been called "the worst-written great novel in the world" and the otherwise loathsome Garrison Keillor has an amusing column about how bad he finds Sister Carrie on rereading it. His books have all the literary grace of the phone book. Thus, his reputation rests solely on the agreement of Left wing critics with his hatred of American capitalism. Well, 100 years on, I think we can safely say that the American system has served us pretty well and the Sister Carrie's of the world are not simply insignificant but, worse for a writer, uninteresting. GRADE: F
Rating:
Summary: ahead of its time
Review: I stumbled on Dreiser in a used book store years ago. What a find! His vivid descriptions made me feel like I was in turn-of-the-century Chicago. And his character development was so real that Carrie and Hurstwood became people I know. Dreiser writes about real life and real relationships and about the choices we make and their effects. He writes about life without the romantic heroism of Hemingway or the aristocratic ex-pat view of Fitzgerald. I love those authors, too, but in Dreiser, I've found a writer whose characters speak to me. Read Sister Carrie. Savor Sister Carrie. But don't stop there: read _An American Tragedy_ and his other books, too.
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