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—August 24, 1901

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

Throughout [Sister Carrie] the phrasing is of the streets and bars—colloquial, familiar, vivid, slangy, unlovely, but intensely real. Of the manner of the book it is not easy to speak favourably; it is strikingly unworthy of the matter thereof. Whilst large, dignified, and generous, the scheme of the story here told is not pretentious, or complex, or ambitious. It is a very plain tale of a plain though eventful life. Between its covers no single note of unreality is struck. It is untrammelled by any single concession to convention or tradition, literary or social. It is as compact of actuality as a police-court record, and throughout its pages one feels pulsing the sturdy, restless energy of a young people, a cosmopolitan community, a nation busy upon the hither side of maturity. The book is, firstly, the full, exhaustive story of the “half-equipped little knight’s” life and adventures; secondly, it is a broad, vivid picture of men and manners in middle-class New York and Chicago; and, thirdly, it is a thorough and really masterly study of the moral, physical, and social deterioration of one Hurstwood, a lover of the heroine. Upon all these counts it is a creditable piece of work, faithful and real in the interest which pertains to genuinely realistic fiction. It is further of interest by reason that it strikes a key-note and is typical, both in the faults of its manner and in the wealth and diversity of its matter, of the great country which gave it birth.

—from The Athenaeum (September 7, 1901)

NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW

Theodore Dreiser’s frankly realistic story called “Sister Carrie,” originally published seven years ago, is now published by Messrs. B. W. Dodge & Co., and deserves to be received as a new book, for it did not get a chance for recognition when it first appeared....

To an extraordinary degree the book is a photograph of conditions in the crude larger cities of America and of the people who make these conditions and are made by them. There is no attempt to complicate the facts as they are with notions of things as they should be morally, or as they might be sentimentally or aesthetically. People’s feelings are not considered. The author is quite impersonal. Withal, the story is interesting in spite of the commonplace character of the personages and the low plane of the gallery in which they move.... It may be added that the story even upon its first publication seven years ago attracted much attention and won favorable recognition in England. We do not, however, recommend the book to the fastidious reader, or the one who clings to “old-fashioned ideas.” It is a book one can very well get along without reading.

—May 25, 1907

SAN FRANCISCO ARGONAUT

When she eventually leaves Drouet and allows herself not quite unwillingly to be abducted by Hurstwood, a special scarlet label will describe the book as an immoral one, quite unsuited to the perusal of the young person and the boarding-school miss. But these critics will have little to say in condemnation of the immorality of a commercial system which offers young girls a wage of three or four dollars a week in payment for labor as destructive to the mind as to the body.

—August 3, 1907

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Something gray and bleak and hurtful that has been in the world almost forever is personified in [Dreiser].

—from Little Review (April 1916)

H. L. MENCKEN

[Dreiser’s] aim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thing he exposes is not the empty event and act, but the endless mystery out of which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in them that is hard to separate from poetry. If this sense of the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of Zola in “Pot-Bouille”—in Nietzsche’s phrase, for “the delight