Sister Carrie is a 1900 novel by Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) about a young woman who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream.

They exchange contact information, but upon discovering the "steady round of toil" and somber atmosphere at her sister's flat, she writes to Drouet and discourages him from calling on her there.

The next day, he rebuffs her feeble attempt to return the money and retain her virtue, taking her shopping at a Chicago department store and buying her a jacket and some shoes.

By the time he introduces her to George Hurstwood, the manager of Fitzgerald and Moy's – a respectable bar that Drouet describes as a "way-up, swell place" – her material appearance has improved considerably.

Hurstwood, a married man with a social-climbing wife, a 20-year-old son, and a 17-year-old daughter, becomes infatuated with Carrie, and they start an affair, meeting secretly while Drouet is on a business trip.

One night, Drouet casually agrees to find an actress to play Laura in an amateur theatrical presentation of Augustin Daly's melodrama Under the Gaslight for his local chapter of the Elks.

Initially, she falls victim to stage fright, but Drouet's encouragement between acts enables her to give a fine performance that rivets the audience's attention and inflames Hurstwood's passion.

After a night of drinking, and despairing at his now-emboldened wife's demands and Carrie's rejection letter, Hurstwood finds that the safe in Fitzgerald and Moy's offices has accidentally been left unlocked.

Through Mrs. Vance, Carrie meets Robert Ames, a young scholar from Indiana and her neighbor's cousin, who introduces her to the idea that great art, rather than showy materialism, is worthy of admiration.

Dreiser's unaltered version was not published until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press issued a scholarly edition based upon the original manuscript held by the New York Public Library.

[8] In his Nobel Prize Lecture of 1930, Sinclair Lewis said that "Dreiser's great first novel, Sister Carrie, which he dared to publish thirty long years ago and which I read twenty-five years ago, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman.

Michael Lydon, in defense of Dreiser, claims that his patience and powers of observation created accurate depictions of the urban world and the desires and ambitions of the people of the time.

"[14] Edna Kenton in the Chicago Daily News wrote in 1900 that Sister Carrie is "well worth reading simply for this account of Hurstwood".

A 1901 review in The Academy wrote that Sister Carrie was "absolutely free from the slightest trace of sentimentality or pettiness, and dominated everywhere by a serious and strenuous desire for truth.

"[14] Another review in Life criticized Carrie's success and warned "Such girls, however, as imagine that they can follow in her footsteps will probably end their days on the Island or in the gutter.

[15] H. L. Mencken, an avid supporter and friend, referred to Dreiser as "a man of large originality, of profound feeling, and of unshakable courage".

[16] In opposition, one critic, Karl F. Zender, argued that Dreiser's stress on circumstance over character was "adequate neither to the artistic power nor to the culture implications of Sister Carrie".

In fact, the novel and its modern ideas of morality helped to produce a movement in which the literary generation of its time was found "detaching itself from its predecessor".

Sloan argued that Dreiser's novel undermined the general opinion that hard work and virtue bring success in life.

[18] Although Dreiser has been criticized for his writing style and lack of formal education, Sister Carrie remains an influential example of naturalism and realism.

[19] The Florentine Opera Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin produced the world premiere of Robert Aldridge and Herschel Garfein's operatic adaptation of the book in October 2016.