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the novel’s characters. When ambitious, confident traveling salesmen like Drouet traveled to Milwaukee or St. Paul on business, they measured their success not only by how many orders their customers placed but by how grandiose the hotel they stayed in was. When Hurstwood’s wife forces him out of their home, he consoles himself by spending the night at Palmer House, Chicago’s most elegant hotel. On the lam, Hurstwood chooses a hotel in Montreal that he hopes will conceal his identity (detectives are on his trail). Arriving in New York, he registers in a hotel, respectable but not expensive, that his friends are unlikely to frequent (he is mortified at the prospect of encountering old acquaintances who will know the reason for his flight). When Hurstwood’s fortunes begin to decline, he idles away wintry afternoons in a lounge chair at the newly constructed Broadway Central Hotel, keeping warm. When he becomes indigent, he seeks work at this same hotel; he performs menial tasks in the basement. The irony of his drastic change of fortune is not lost on Hurstwood. Freefalling into the social abyss, he passes a night in a third-rate hotel on Bleecker Street or an unheated Bowery fleabag hotel, in the company of bums and other lost souls. He turns on the gas jets in just such a squalid room.

By contrast, as Carrie’s reputation as an actress grows, she is courted by such posh hotels as the Wellington and the Waldorf to move into their spacious suites with all the latest amenities. Caught up in the machinery of publicity and status, the hotels are eager to associate their names with Carrie’s glamour and celebrity, and so they offer her a handsome discount. In the novel’s last image, Carrie sits by a window in a rocking chair, lost in reverie. The space she occupies in the Waldorf is sizable, but she remains trapped in a gilded cage.

Restaurants are another pivotal setting in Sister Carrie. At Carrie’s sister Minnie’s home, the meals are simple and monotonous, if adequate. Part of Drouet’s campaign to woo Carrie entails treating her to meals in restaurants like the Old Windsor, which served robust fare like sirloin steak, roast chicken, and asparagus in an ambience that was warm and welcoming. For Carrie it is like being a guest at a royal banquet. The prices astonish her, but the glowing lights, the food, and the attentive service, Dreiser stresses, awaken other desires and hungers. In the New York section of the novel, a dinner at Louis Sherry’s is an important set piece, with Mr. Vance playing the knowing host, and Ames, Dreiser’s stand-in as acerbic culture critic. The Gilded Age was notable for excess and extravagant self-indulgence, its Lucullan feasts rivaling those of the ancient Romans. A stern moralist, Dreiser makes no bones that he disapproves of the immoderate eating: seven-course meals that featured oysters, foie gras, roasts, rich sauces and desserts, champagne and vintage wines. The decor at Sherry’s is equally a gaudy display of luxurious good taste—Tiffany lamps, fine china, glassware, and cutlery—all meant to flatter the restaurant’s upper-class clientele for their “superiority” in patronizing it. Carrie is enthralled by this gastronomic temple, but her enthusiasm is tempered by Ames’s disgust with the vulgar wastefulness. What especially peeves him is the ostentation: the expensive clothes and jewels, the enormous effort and cost to strut and be seen, as if Americans were copying the chic Parisians of la Belle Epoque. Dreiser’s growing up hungry doubtless affected his harsh view of the pretentious upper classes and his empathy for the poor who barely can find a crust of bread to sustain them.

Theater of all genres—vaudeville, Shakespeare, musicals in which choruses of scantily clad girls danced in ranks like the Rockettes, melodramas, drawing-room comedies—was immensely popular in America after the Civil War. However, the country did not produce a single major playwright in the nineteenth century. The old Puritan hostility to theater as Satan’s way to corrupt morals weakened but did not disappear. Great theater