Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
Sister Carrie
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Chapter I: four dollars, a paper box lunch and the Chicago train
When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.
To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours—a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister’s address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.
Download Full EPUB1900
~156,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 8.7 hours
Standalone
Chicago, Montreal and New York, from August 1889
Chapters I-XLVII
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0.40 MB (EPUB) · 0.70 MB (AZW3) · 0.47 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #5267
Sister Carrie is Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, published in 1900. Caroline Meeber, eighteen, leaves Columbia City, Wisconsin, with four dollars, a small trunk and a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, and gets off the train in Chicago in August 1889. Her sister gives her a bed on West Van Buren Street; a shoe factory gives her four and a half dollars a week. On the train she has met Charles Drouet, a salesman who talks about dry goods and card games, and through him she meets George Hurstwood, the manager of a saloon called Fitzgerald and Moy’s. The novel then runs two lives at once: Carrie’s rise from a chorus line to her own name in electric lights, and Hurstwood’s long fall.
The book keeps its accounts in exact figures: four-fifty a week at the factory, sixty cents a week for car fare she cannot spare, twelve dollars a week for a household in New York, ten thousand dollars behind a saloon safe, twenty dollars left on a table with a note. Dreiser had been a reporter and had been poor in both cities, and he writes without passing sentence on anyone; the last chapter asks who is to cast the first stone. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #5267, complete in forty-seven chapters, and the EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files are free below.
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser: Summary, Characters & Themes
Sister Carrie is a summary and analysis of Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel: forty-seven chapters that open on an afternoon train in August 1889 and close in a rocking chair in New York. Caroline Meeber is eighteen, and her total outfit is a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a lunch in a paper box and a yellow leather snap purse holding her ticket, her sister’s address and four dollars. The address is on West Van Buren Street, where Minnie and her husband S. C. Hanson keep a flat on the third floor. The shoe factory across the river hires her at four and a half dollars a week, and the foreman who stops at her machine asks where she came from. Dreiser gives the answer for the next four hundred pages. Chicago in this novel is not a villain; it is a set of rooms at a price, and the price is stated on every other page.
Her education in the city is almost entirely commercial. Drouet, the drummer she met on the train, takes her to dinner, buys her two ten-dollar bills’ worth of clothes at The Fair, and installs her in three furnished rooms in Ogden Place facing Union Park, where she becomes, in his phrase, Mrs. Drouet. Hurstwood, the manager of Fitzgerald and Moy’s in Adams Street, is a different order of man: a house near Lincoln Park with ten rooms, a stable, a wife and two children. When he wants her he begins by wanting to be seen with her, and an amateur theatrical at Avery Hall gives him the excuse. Carrie plays Laura in Under the Gaslight under the name Carrie Madenda, and the audience, packed by Hurstwood’s friends, tells her what she had not known: that the stage is the one place where her particular gift counts.
Dreiser was thirty when the book appeared. He had grown up poor in Indiana, worked as a laundry boy and a reporter in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and New York, and had watched his own sisters make the kind of bargain Carrie makes. Theodore Dreiser wrote in a flat, ledger-like prose that keeps its distances, and Doubleday, Page & Co. took the book reluctantly: the publisher’s own household objected to it, it went out in 1900 with little support, sold in the low hundreds and was reissued by another house in 1907. Dreiser had no gift for the polished sentence and knew it; what he had was a reporter’s memory for the weight of a coin in a pocket, and the novel trusts that memory over any argument about virtue. Reviewers who admired its truth disliked its manners.
What makes the novel unusual is that it refuses to punish. Carrie is neither ruined nor rewarded in any tidy sense; she gets the dressing room, the notices, the carriage and the bank account, and the narrator reports her loneliness in the same dry voice he uses for her wages. Hurstwood’s decline is traced through rents, overcoats and the price of a bed rather than through moral commentary, and the famous last appeal about the first stone is a question, not a verdict. Hurstwood’s decline proceeds by invoice in the same way: the furniture sold, the overcoat worn thin, the price of a night’s lodging counted out in coins. The two plots are one argument: appetite is not a sin in this book, but it is expensive, and the bill is itemised.
Readers who want the same city from another window can try The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton’s 1905 New York novel of a woman with expensive tastes and no income, or The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 Packingtown, where the wage is also the plot. The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s 1899 study of a woman who discovers what she wants, makes a third. Each of the three was published within seven years of this one, and each answers the question Dreiser’s book asks in a different key. The complete text of Sister Carrie used for this page is the Project Gutenberg transcription, #5267.
Historical Context
Chicago in 1889, as the novel presents it, is a machine for sorting arrivals. The flat on West Van Buren Street, the wholesale district across the river, the shoe factory with its smell of machine oil and new leather, the State Street stores that Dreiser calls vast retail combinations — each is a station on a route that runs from a four-dollar purse to a dressing room. The wages are the ones a young woman without a trade could expect in that decade, and the novel is careful about them: sixty cents a week for car fare is enough to make Carrie walk, and a pair of new shoes is a decision with a date in it. Dreiser’s Chicago is also a city of arrivals: the novel notes that people were pouring in at the rate of fifty thousand a year, and that Carrie’s sister’s flat was one of the places they poured into.
The two institutions that drive the plot are the saloon and the theatre. Fitzgerald and Moy’s, in Adams Street opposite the Federal Building, is a resort with a manager, a cashier, a safe and a clientele of merchants, salesmen and professional men; its money makes Hurstwood a catch, and its safe makes him a fugitive. The theatre is amateur at first — an Elks lodge hires Avery Hall, a professional director drills volunteers, a reporter from the Times runs four-line notes — then professional, at the Casino, where a chorus part is paid by the week and a name on the programme is worth more than the salary. The book’s account of the strike and of the working poor is close to reportage: a trolley man’s complaint is quoted with its hours and its pay.
Dreiser had been a reporter in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and New York before he wrote the book, and the manuscript’s plainness about desire and money made trouble at Doubleday, Page & Co., where the publisher’s household read it and objected. It came out in 1900, sold poorly, and was reissued by B. W. Dodge & Co. in 1907; its reputation was made later. The naturalist programme behind it — people as products of environment, appetite and accident — was familiar from Zola and Hardy, but American reviewers found the absence of judgment harder to take than the subject. By the 1930s critics were reading the novel as the beginning of modern American fiction, and the rocking chair had become a set piece of the criticism. The 1900 printing was not the text readers now use, and the differences between the early and the later versions are a small industry of their own.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Caroline Meeber (Carrie): Eighteen when she steps off the train in Chicago with four dollars and a sister’s address. She works a machine in a shoe factory for four and a half dollars a week, becomes Drouet’s Mrs. Drouet in three rented rooms, then Hurstwood’s companion under a name she never chose. On the stage she is Carrie Madenda, and that name outlives both men. When she leaves she puts a note and twenty dollars on the table, and the last pages find her in a rocking chair with a view of the city she has paid for.
- George Hurstwood: Manager of Fitzgerald and Moy’s, with a ten-room house near Lincoln Park, a wife called Julia, a son and a daughter, and the standing that comes with a good saloon. He is careful of his appearance and used to being obeyed. The letters from McGregor, James and Hay, the open safe with its parcels of a thousand, and a cab at the kerb take him through Montreal to New York, where he becomes Mr. Wheeler, then a partner in a Warren Street saloon, then a man reading the help-wanted column and counting the price of a bed.
- Charles H. Drouet: A travelling salesman for Bartlett, Caryoe & Company who introduces himself on the train and explains that the name is pronounced Drew-eh, French on his father’s side. He is generous, vain, cheerful and forgetful. He buys Carrie clothes at The Fair, sets her up in Ogden Place, invents her stage name for an Elks benefit, and is surprised by nothing for long. He reappears at a stage door years later, unchanged in any particular, and the narrator calls him the old butterfly. He is the least malicious person in the book and the one who does most to set it moving.
- Robert Ames: Mrs. Vance’s cousin, down from Indianapolis for a week, connected with an electrical company, smooth-shaven and serious. He takes Carrie to the theatre and afterwards leaves her with the judgment that the stage is good and the literature she reads is poor, a sentence that outlasts his visit. He recommends a novel, Père Goriot, which she is reading at the Waldorf years later, and his sense that riches are not everything becomes the standard against which she measures the men around her. He is on the page for perhaps twenty pages in all, and the novel treats him as a measure rather than a suitor.
Core Literary Themes
- Money as the plot’s engine: The novel is built out of prices. Four and a half dollars a week at the shoe factory, sixty cents for car fare, two ten-dollar bills from a drummer, twelve dollars a week for a New York household, twenty-eight dollars for rent, ten thousand in a saloon safe, fifteen cents for a bed. Dreiser never lets a scene run long without a figure in it, and the figures do the moral work that the narrator declines to do himself.
- Clothes and the persuaded eye: Fine clothes to her were a vast persuasion, Dreiser writes of Carrie, and the phrase covers the whole book: the boa against the winter, the corset counter at The Fair, the imitation alligator satchel that is already a copy of a better thing. The city is a display case, and wanting what is displayed is treated neither as vice nor as virtue, only as the force that moves people from one room to another.
- Two lives, one direction: Carrie rises while Hurstwood falls, and the chapters alternate between a dressing room and a furnished room. The shape of the book is a set of contrasts: applause and the bread line, a carriage and a fifteen-cent bed, a name in lights and a name nobody asks for. Dreiser keeps the two lines parallel, so that each success has a corresponding cost somewhere else on the page. The effect is less like a plot than like double-entry bookkeeping, with a credit in one column and a matching debit in the other.
- Judgment withheld: The narrator explains, digresses and generalises, but he does not sentence. Hurstwood’s theft is shown as a sequence of small physical decisions, Carrie’s choices as a sequence of small economies, and the closing question about the first stone is left open. That refusal is the novel’s method and its scandal: it asks readers to watch without being handed a verdict to agree with. The result is a book that reads like evidence and asks to be judged like evidence.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Sister Carrie?
Because the novel is a hundred and fifty-six thousand words of exact accounting, and the accounting is the pleasure. Read it for the wages, the rents and the prices, and for the way a character’s whole situation can be given in one purchase: a boa, a pair of shoes, a stage name, a ten-cent bed. It is also the first American novel to take a working girl’s appetite seriously and to refuse to punish her for it, which is why it was shelved in 1900 and is taught in every survey course now. There are no chapter headings beyond the numbers and the paired phrases Dreiser set at the top of each one, and those are kept exactly as printed.
This edition gives the complete forty-seven chapters in order, with the chapter titles as the book prints them and the text checked against the Project Gutenberg transcription. The file is built for e-readers rather than for scans: a working table of contents, chapter breaks that survive a font change, no page images and no OCR debris. The paragraphing and the italics follow the source, and the long digressions are left where they are, because in this novel the digressions are part of the argument. The EPUB is under half a megabyte, so it downloads in a moment and opens without a wait on an old reader.
It is a long book that reads fast, because the scenes are short and the sentences are plain. If you have only met Sister Carrie as a title on a syllabus, the surprise is how much of it is dialogue and how little of it is sermon. Take the EPUB for a phone or a tablet, the AZW3 for a Kindle, or the KEPUB for a Kobo with kepub features; the text is the same in all three, nothing is locked, and nothing expires. Print it if you want paper, or read it on a phone in a queue; the text reflows at any font size.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #5267 — the source text used for this edition, with all forty-seven chapters, the chapter titles and the original paragraphing. Where the source has a long digression, the digression is kept, and nothing has been rewritten for modern taste. The transcription is the Project Gutenberg one, and its list of corrections is preserved at the end of the file.
- Complete 47-chapter text No abridgement, no modernised spelling and no dropped final chapter: the novel as Doubleday, Page & Co. issued it in 1900, including the chapters the first reviewers disliked most and the ones later critics cite as the start of American naturalism. The chapter titles, with their paired phrases, are set as headings rather than run into the text.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB One download per format, so the book opens properly on a Kindle, a Kobo, an iPhone, an iPad and every other reader, with the table of contents intact and the chapter breaks, italics and paragraph spacing preserved through a font change. The table of contents links to every chapter, and the cover shown at the top of this page travels with the file.
- Free and DRM-free Public domain in the United States, with no account, no sample chapter, no email address and no lock on the file. Copy it to as many devices as you own, keep it after the site changes, and check your own country’s copyright term if you live outside the United States.
- The House of Mirth — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Jungle — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Awakening — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The novel runs to forty-seven chapters and about 156,000 words. These twelve summaries follow the text in order and stop before the last pages.
- Chapters I-III: August 1889. Caroline Meeber, eighteen, boards the afternoon train at Columbia City with a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a paper box of lunch and four dollars in a yellow leather purse. A drummer introduces himself, gives her his card — Bartlett, Caryoe & Company — and explains that the name is pronounced Drew-eh. In Chicago her sister Minnie and S. C. Hanson give her a bed on West Van Buren Street, third floor, and the flat smells of cooking while the street smells of horse-cars. She walks to save sixty cents a week in car fare and finds work at a shoe factory: four and a half dollars a week, a machine, and a foreman who asks where she came from.
- Chapters IV-VII: Four-fifty a week will not buy the clothes the city displays, and Carrie learns the arithmetic of the shop windows: the wholesale district across the river, the stone fronts of the avenue, a fur-lined coat she cannot afford. Drouet turns up at the factory gate in the wet and buys her dinner; later he presses two soft green ten-dollar bills into her hand and takes her to The Fair, where she spends them at the corset counter and comes out with a different walk. Dreiser notes that these vast retail combinations were new in the world, and that Carrie is being taught to want by professionals.
- Chapters VIII-XI: Winter. Drouet waits outside the factory and tells her to wear her boa against the night air, and the six o’clock crowd on the pavement is the audience for his arm across her shoulders. By the next chapters Carrie has left the Hansons and is installed in three furnished rooms in Ogden Place facing Union Park, with a parlour and a rocking chair. Hurstwood, the manager of Fitzgerald and Moy’s, comes to dinner, and the two men talk about the finest resort in town. Carrie asks Drouet why they do not marry, and he answers with a compliment. Fine clothes, Dreiser writes, were to her a vast persuasion.
- Chapters XII-XV: Hurstwood’s house near Lincoln Park has ten rooms, a bay window, a stable with a horse and trap, a wife called Julia, a son, and a daughter, Jessica, who plays Portia in a school performance. He calls at Ogden Place two days after the parlour scene and finds Carrie fluttered and pleased. Drouet, away selling in La Crosse and talking about a raise in June, notices nothing; the neighbour Mrs. Hale watches Hurstwood’s carriage from an upper window. Carrie walks past the mansions at night, decides that the people inside them are happy, and wishes to be seen with a man who is obeyed when he speaks.
- Chapters XVI-XIX: Drouet’s Elks lodge needs a young woman for an amateur night at Avery Hall on the 16th, and he volunteers Carrie for a part in Under the Gaslight without asking her. She is frightened, then interested; he invents a stage name, Carrie Madenda, and an address, Twenty-nine Ogden Place. Rehearsals are run by a hired director who bullies the volunteers, and Mr. Bamberger, playing Ray, keeps demanding an explanation. Hurstwood quietly fills the house with friends and gets the Times to run four-line notes. On the night Carrie plays Laura to a full hall, and Hurstwood tells her afterwards that it was delightful.
- Chapters XX-XXIII: The success at Avery Hall changes the temperature. Hurstwood begins to press Carrie to leave Drouet, and she half agrees, then lies awake counting the reasons not to; the chapter title calls her a spirit in travail with one rung put behind her. Drouet finds out, there is a scene in the flat, and Hurstwood’s perfidy wounds her like a knife. Meanwhile Mrs. Hurstwood has been watching her husband dress, and she demands a season ticket to the races at a hundred and fifty dollars, where a friend tells her what Chicago already knows. Jealousy that had been born of love turns into hate, and the wife starts talking to a lawyer.
- Chapters XXIV-XXVII: Hurstwood sleeps at the Palmer House and walks the floor of his office. A letter from McGregor, James and Hay says that Mrs. Julia Hurstwood has retained them and will file for divorce and alimony by Thursday at one o’clock; a second letter repeats the deadline. Late on Tuesday he calls at Ogden Place, is told Carrie has gone to the theatre, and comes back to the resort as it closes, with the cashier gone home and the safe door standing open. Inside are parcels of a thousand dollars in fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. He counts ten parcels, closes the safe, and stands with his hand on the knob.
- Chapters XXVIII-XXXI: The rest of that night is a cab, a train and a lie: Hurstwood tells Carrie that Drouet has been hurt, and she travels with him as far as Detroit before she understands. They go on to Montreal, where he reads the newspapers in the hotel parlour and expects a detective at every door, and then to New York, where he takes the name Wheeler. For a thousand dollars and his managerial manner he buys a third interest in a Warren Street saloon that must yield a hundred and fifty dollars a month. They rent a flat on Seventy-eighth Street near Amsterdam Avenue, and Carrie puts a piano in the parlour.
- Chapters XXXII-XXXVI: The neighbours are the Vances, and Mrs. Vance’s cousin Ames comes down from Indianapolis for a week: smooth-shaven, serious, connected with an electrical company. He takes Carrie to the theatre and afterwards says that the stage is good and the literature she reads is poor, a judgment that stays with her. Then the years slope. The saloon’s trade thins, the partner Shaughnessy quarrels, Slawson will not renew the lease, and the flat gives way to rooms on Thirteenth Street. Carrie stops writing to Mrs. Vance rather than give the address, and Hurstwood reads the help-wanted column without finding anything in it.
- Chapters XXXVII-XLII: With the last fifty dollars going, Carrie goes to the Casino and asks for chorus work. The manager, Mr. Gray, takes her; she is one of the group of oriental beauties paraded in the second act, and a comedian’s mock question about who she is gets an answer that raises the laugh and earns a line in the papers. A second engagement pays twenty dollars a week. Hurstwood, meanwhile, takes a strike job as a motorman in Brooklyn with two policemen on the platform, and quits after a day of stones and shouting. The rent is twenty-eight dollars, and the flat is too much for it.
- Chapters XLIII-XLV: Carrie takes a room of her own and leaves a note on the table: there is no use trying to keep up the flat, I am leaving twenty dollars, you can do what you like with the furniture. Hurstwood comes back to a flat without her little ornamental clock on the mantelpiece. Her new dressing room is a promotion — you are to use this room, Miss Madenda — and Mrs. Vance, meeting her by accident, says that the name threw her off. Hurstwood’s furniture goes for seventy dollars, and he begins to sleep in a thirty-five-cent room, then in ten-cent beds, and to read her name in the World.
- Chapters XLVI-XLVII: Drouet turns up at the stage door with a half-dollar for the attendant and news of Hurstwood’s ten thousand dollars, most of it sent back. Hurstwood waits for Carrie in the snow and asks her for the price of a meal; she gives him what she has. The last chapter moves through the mission house in Fifteenth Street, where a wooden box takes the contributions and a sister counts the men at the free noon meal, and the bakery counter on Broadway where three hundred men wait for the midnight loaf. Under an electric sign that spells her name, Hurstwood stands in the crowd and asks whether he was ever good enough for her.
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