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Since ownership of their house is legally in her name, Hurstwood is without a weapon to fight back. Faced with an ultimatum from his wife’s lawyer that he pay her a large sum or face public exposure as an adulterer, he wavers. At this point, an element of chance becomes a crucial variable: The safe, normally locked, is left ajar. Hurstwood wrestles with the angel of moral quandaries: Should he take the money or not? He knows that there will be disastrous consequences if he’s caught—humiliation and disgrace, even jail—but although he can still distinguish between good and evil, the habit of virtue has loosened its hold on him. Reason deserts him. He “drifts” into his momentous decision, and that verb “drifts” is Dreiser’s metaphor for the wayward impulses and rhythms of the passive, yearning, befuddled, half-conscious mind. (Carrie often succumbs to this maundering state, too.) After an agonizing inner debate, Hurstwood steals $10,000, spirits Carrie away by the ruse that Drouet has been hospitalized, promises to marry her, and runs off like a criminal to escape detection. This ethical lapse sets in motion Hurstwood’s downward spiral from “fastidious comfort” to death by asphyxiation in a room on skid row. In etching the wreckage of Hurstwood’s life, Dreiser finds his own compelling voice and reveals the pity and terror in an American tragedy.

Herbert Leibowitz is the editor and publisher of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. His books include Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography and Hart Crane: An Introduction to the Poetry. He is currently writing a critical biography of William Carlos Williams.

A Note on Hotels, Homes,

Restaurants, and the Theater

Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is a rich mother lode of information about American social history. As a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis, Dreiser met people of all classes. He interviewed factory girls and bosses in sweatshops, and dandies, merchants, salesmen, and actors in fancy bars, and he listened to quack spiritualists spin their webs of deception. He observed where the people with money shopped, dined, entertained, socialized, and vacationed, what material possessions they coveted and purchased to decorate their homes, what newspapers they read, what clubs they joined, what they wished for their children. But he was also a connoisseur of the economy of scarcity; he wrote of the poor who struggled to keep their heads above water—toiling long hours for low wages, being maimed in workplace accidents, dying young.

After the fire of 1871, Chicago rose from the ashes and grew at an amazingly rapid pace into a modern city. It was a brash frontier for advanced ideas about architecture, merchandising, transportation, and social work. For those who sipped of the heady brew of success, it was bliss to live in such times. But of course many fortunes were built on the backs of the workers, often immigrants, who flocked to Chicago in search of employment. This vast under-class daily faced a series of grim realities; in their short, brutalized lives, they experienced extremes of deprivation and despair. All this Dreiser chronicled in his novels with little editorializing. For him, images of gaunt homeless men scavenging for food and shivering in the cold were worth pages of polemics.

One of the signs of a secure or unsheltered life was the home you lived in or the hotel you stayed in when you were traveling. Throughout Sister Carrie Dreiser describes the interiors of residences, from the cramped quarters of Carrie’s brother-in-law, Hanson, who works at the stockyards, to Hurstwood’s comfortable bourgeois house, to the cozy flat Drouet rents for Carrie. And although Dreiser never takes us inside the plutocrats’ mansions, they were a point of civic pride and envy: Carrie drives by these symbols of material success in a carriage and marvels at them, much as tourists in Hollywood gawk at the homes of actors.

In Sister Carrie, one can almost compile a directory of Chicago and New York hotels that would accurately track the fortunes and status of