Posted by Review of Sister Carrie
Audio clip:
Review of Sister Carrie
Review of Sister Carrie
Audio clip:
📚 Sister Carrie: Fame, Desire, and the Cost of Ambition
A Review by Jake Cosmos Aller
✨ Teaser
What happens when a young woman defies the moral expectations of her time and rises to fame without punishment? Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie shocked early 20th-century readers with its unapologetic portrayal of ambition, desire, and urban survival. If you’ve ever wondered how realism, naturalism, and fame collide—this novel is your gateway.
🔍 Overview
Published in 1900, Sister Carrie is a landmark of American literary realism. Carrie Meeber moves from rural Wisconsin to Chicago and later New York, becoming a Broadway star. She follows her own path, challenges conventional morality, and never marries—remaining independent and emotionally complex. A very modern woman in that sense.
📖 Literary Reputation
Initially suppressed for its controversial themes, Sister Carrie is now considered one of the greatest American urban novels. Dreiser’s naturalistic style—where characters are shaped by forces beyond their control—helped define a new literary era.
⚙️ Comparison to Other Working-Class Novels
Unlike British factory novels like Mary Barton or Michael Armstrong, Dreiser’s story focuses on urban ambition and consumer culture. It’s less moralistic than Dickens’ Hard Times, offering a detached, observational lens on fate and circumstance.
📚 Other Works by Dreiser
- Jennie Gerhardt (1911)
- The Financier (1912)
- The Titan (1914)
- An American Tragedy (1925)
- The Stoic (1947, posthumous)
🎬 Sister Carrie vs. A Star Is Born
Both stories follow a rising female star and a declining male counterpart. Carrie ascends while George Hurstwood falls. Similarly, Ally rises in A Star Is Born while Jackson Maine spirals into self-destruction.
💔 Fame and Its Consequences
Carrie gains wealth but remains emotionally unfulfilled. Hurstwood, like Jackson Maine, struggles with fading relevance and ends in tragedy, as he falls into poverty and dies alone in a ghetto tenement.
⚖️ Gender & Power Dynamics
The men start with authority—Hurstwood as a manager, Jackson as a musician—but lose power as their partners rise. The shift is subtle, tragic, and telling.
🎭 Naturalism vs. Melodrama
Sister Carrie is grounded in naturalism, where fate is indifferent. A Star Is Born leans into melodrama, driven by emotion. Yet both explore the unpredictable cost of ambition.
📘 Synopsis
Carrie Meeber, 18, leaves Wisconsin for Chicago. She becomes involved with Charles Drouet and George Hurstwood, gaining comfort and eventually fame as an actress in New York. Hurstwood’s life collapses. The novel explores ambition, desire, and urban survival.
👤 About Theodore Dreiser
Born in 1871 in Indiana, Dreiser faced poverty and worked as a journalist before turning to fiction. His naturalistic worldview emphasized how environment and circumstance shape human behavior. Despite censorship, he became a major figure in American literature.
💬 Memorable Quotes
- “How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.”
- “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things…”
- “People in general attach too much importance to words.”
🔗 Want More?
Check out these reviews:
- Goodreads: Sister Carrie Reviews
- Engelsberg Ideas: Great Books Series
- Compulsive Reader: Tom Frenkel’s Review
Note: Background information provided by Co-Pilot.
50 Books to Read Before You Die
I have been reading for the last few years classic literature. This novel is part of a collection of classic works – 50 books to read before you die available on Kindle. I have read most of these already. The following is the list with the titles I have read in bold.
Vol 1 starts with Volume One
Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Austen, Jane: Emma
Balzac, Honoré de: Father Goriot
Barbusse, Henri: The Inferno
Brontë, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan of the Apes
Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh
Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Cather, Willa: My Ántonia
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
Cleland, John: Fanny Hill
Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo
Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
Cummings, E. E.: The Enormous Room
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles: Bleak House
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot
Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie
Dumas, Alexandre: The Three Musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Flaubert, Gustave: Sentimental Education
Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
Forster, E. M.: A Room With a View
Forster, E. M.: Howard End
Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls
Gorky, Maxim: The Mother
Haggard, H. Rider: King Solomon’s Mines
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
Homer: The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables
Huxley, Aldous: Crome Yellow
James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
Volume 2
– Little Women [Louisa May Alcott]
– Sense and Sensibility [Jane Austen]
– Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) [J.M. Barrie]
– Cabin Fever [ B. M. Bower]
– The Secret Garden [Frances Hodgson Burnett]
– A Little Princess [Frances Hodgson Burnett]
– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [Lewis Carroll]
– The King in Yellow [Robert William Chambers]
– The Man Who Knew Too Much [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Woman in White [Wilkie Collins]
– The Most Dangerous Game [Richard Connell]
– Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe]
– On the Origin of Species, 6th Edition [Charles Darwin]
– The Iron Woman [Margaret Deland]
– David Copperfield [Charles Dickens]
– Oliver Twist [Charles Dickens]
– A Tale of Two Cities [Charles Dickens]
– The Double [Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Francis Scott Fitzgerald]
– A Room with a View [E. M. Forster]
– Dream Psychology [Sigmund Freud]
– Tess of the d’Urbervilles [Thomas Hardy]
– Siddhartha [Hermann Hesse]
– Dubliners [James Joyce]
– The Fall of the House of Usher [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Arabian Nights [Andrew Lang]
– The Sea Wolf [Jack London]
– The Call of Cthulhu [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– Anne of Green Gables [Lucy Maud Montgomery]
– Beyond Good and Evil [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche]
– The Murders in the Rue Morgue [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Black Cat [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Raven [Edgar Allan Poe]
– Swann’s Way [Marcel Proust]
– Romeo and Juliet [William Shakespeare]
– Treasure Island [Robert Louis Stevenson]
– The Elements of Style [William Strunk Jr.
Vol 3 finished keeping for the historical record
This book contains the following works arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names.
Starting with volume 3 then will go back and do volumes one, two, and the Harvard classics. The goal is to finish all of these by the end of next year. I almost finished Volume One. Will do some of the WC reading books as well.
– What’s Bred in the Bone [Grant Allen]
– The Golden Ass [Lucius Apuleius]
– Meditations [Marcus Aurelius]
– Northanger Abbey [Jane Austen]
– Lady Susan [Jane Austen]
– The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [Lyman Frank Baum]
– The Art of Public Speaking [Dale Breckenridge Carnegie]
– The Blazing World [Margaret Cavendish]
– The Wisdom of Father Brown [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– Heretics [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Donnington Affair [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Innocence of Father Brown [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [John Cleland]
– The Moonstone [Wilkie Collins]
– Lord Jim [Joseph Conrad]
– The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe]
– The Pickwick Papers [Charles Dickens]
– A Christmas Carol [Charles Dickens]
– Notes From The Underground [Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
– The Gambler par Fyodor [Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
– The Lost World [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Hound of the Baskervilles [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Sign of the Four [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Man in the Iron Mask [Alexandre Dumas]
– The Three Musketeers [Alexandre Dumas]
– This Side of Paradise [Francis Scott Fitzgerald]
– Curious, If True: Strange Tales [Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell]
– King Solomon’s Mines [Henry Rider Haggard]
– The Hunchback of Notre Dame [Victor Hugo]
– Kim [Rudyard Kipling]
– Captain Courageous [Rudyard Kipling]
– The Jungle Book [Rudyard Kipling]
– Lady Chatterley’s Lover [David Herbert Lawrence]
– The Son of the Wolf [Jack London]
– The Einstein Theory of Relativity [Hendrik Antoon Lorentz]
– The Dunwich Horror [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– At the Mountains of Madness [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– The Prince [Niccolò Machiavelli]
– The Story Girl [Lucy Maud Montgomery]
– The Antichrist [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche]
– The Republic [Plato]
– The Last Man [Mary Shelley]
– Life On The Mississippi [Mark Twain]
– The Kama Sutra [Vatsyayana]
– In the Year 2889 [Jules Verne]
– Around the World in Eighty Days [Jules Verne]
– Four Just Men [Edgar Wallace]
– Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ [Lewis Wallace]
– Jacob’s Room [Virginia Woolf]
Reading the Classics Updated Lists
Cosmos Reading List 2025 Updates
Medium
Substack
Substack Podcast
Spotify Podcast
Wattpad
The End
3
20
20
20
📚 Sister Carrie: Fame, Desire, and the Cost of Ambition
A Review by Jake Cosmos Aller
✨ Teaser
What happens when a young woman defies the moral expectations of her time and rises to fame without punishment? Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie shocked early 20th-century readers with its unapologetic portrayal of ambition, desire, and urban survival. If you’ve ever wondered how realism, naturalism, and fame collide—this novel is your gateway.
🔍 Overview
Published in 1900, Sister Carrie is a landmark of American literary realism. Carrie Meeber moves from rural Wisconsin to Chicago and later New York, becoming a Broadway star. She follows her own path, challenges conventional morality, and never marries—remaining independent and emotionally complex. A very modern woman in that sense.
📖 Literary Reputation
Initially suppressed for its controversial themes, Sister Carrie is now considered one of the greatest American urban novels. Dreiser’s naturalistic style—where characters are shaped by forces beyond their control—helped define a new literary era.
⚙️ Comparison to Other Working-Class Novels
Unlike British factory novels like Mary Barton or Michael Armstrong, Dreiser’s story focuses on urban ambition and consumer culture. It’s less moralistic than Dickens’ Hard Times, offering a detached, observational lens on fate and circumstance.
📚 Other Works by Dreiser
- Jennie Gerhardt (1911)
- The Financier (1912)
- The Titan (1914)
- An American Tragedy (1925)
- The Stoic (1947, posthumous)
🎬 Sister Carrie vs. A Star Is Born
Both stories follow a rising female star and a declining male counterpart. Carrie ascends while George Hurstwood falls. Similarly, Ally rises in A Star Is Born while Jackson Maine spirals into self-destruction.
💔 Fame and Its Consequences
Carrie gains wealth but remains emotionally unfulfilled. Hurstwood, like Jackson Maine, struggles with fading relevance and ends in tragedy, as he falls into poverty and dies alone in a ghetto tenement.
⚖️ Gender & Power Dynamics
The men start with authority—Hurstwood as a manager, Jackson as a musician—but lose power as their partners rise. The shift is subtle, tragic, and telling.
🎭 Naturalism vs. Melodrama
Sister Carrie is grounded in naturalism, where fate is indifferent. A Star Is Born leans into melodrama, driven by emotion. Yet both explore the unpredictable cost of ambition.
📘 Synopsis
Carrie Meeber, 18, leaves Wisconsin for Chicago. She becomes involved with Charles Drouet and George Hurstwood, gaining comfort and eventually fame as an actress in New York. Hurstwood’s life collapses. The novel explores ambition, desire, and urban survival.
👤 About Theodore Dreiser
Born in 1871 in Indiana, Dreiser faced poverty and worked as a journalist before turning to fiction. His naturalistic worldview emphasized how environment and circumstance shape human behavior. Despite censorship, he became a major figure in American literature.
💬 Memorable Quotes
- “How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.”
- “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things…”
- “People in general attach too much importance to words.”
🔗 Want More?
Check out these reviews:
- Goodreads: Sister Carrie Reviews
- Engelsberg Ideas: Great Books Series
- Compulsive Reader: Tom Frenkel’s Review
Note: Background information provided by Co-Pilot.
50 Books to Read Before You Die
I have been reading for the last few years classic literature. This novel is part of a collection of classic works – 50 books to read before you die available on Kindle. I have read most of these already. The following is the list with the titles I have read in bold.
Vol 1 starts with Volume One
Alcott, Louisa May: Little Women
Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice
Austen, Jane: Emma
Balzac, Honoré de: Father Goriot
Barbusse, Henri: The Inferno
Brontë, Anne: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: Tarzan of the Apes
Butler, Samuel: The Way of All Flesh
Carroll, Lewis: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Cather, Willa: My Ántonia
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote
Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
Cleland, John: Fanny Hill
Collins, Wilkie: The Moonstone
Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness
Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo
Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen: The Red Badge of Courage
Cummings, E. E.: The Enormous Room
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders
Dickens, Charles: Bleak House
Dickens, Charles: Great Expectations
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot
Doyle, Arthur Conan: The Hound of the Baskervilles
Dreiser, Theodore: Sister Carrie
Dumas, Alexandre: The Three Musketeers
Dumas, Alexandre: The Count of Monte Cristo
Eliot, George: Middlemarch
Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones
Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
Flaubert, Gustave: Sentimental Education
Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
Forster, E. M.: A Room With a View
Forster, E. M.: Howard End
Gaskell, Elizabeth: North and South
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Gogol, Nikolai: Dead Souls
Gorky, Maxim: The Mother
Haggard, H. Rider: King Solomon’s Mines
Hardy, Thomas: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel: The Scarlet Letter
Homer: The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hugo, Victor: Les Misérables
Huxley, Aldous: Crome Yellow
James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
Volume 2
– Little Women [Louisa May Alcott]
– Sense and Sensibility [Jane Austen]
– Peter Pan (Peter and Wendy) [J.M. Barrie]
– Cabin Fever [ B. M. Bower]
– The Secret Garden [Frances Hodgson Burnett]
– A Little Princess [Frances Hodgson Burnett]
– Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [Lewis Carroll]
– The King in Yellow [Robert William Chambers]
– The Man Who Knew Too Much [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Woman in White [Wilkie Collins]
– The Most Dangerous Game [Richard Connell]
– Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe]
– On the Origin of Species, 6th Edition [Charles Darwin]
– The Iron Woman [Margaret Deland]
– David Copperfield [Charles Dickens]
– Oliver Twist [Charles Dickens]
– A Tale of Two Cities [Charles Dickens]
– The Double [Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [Francis Scott Fitzgerald]
– A Room with a View [E. M. Forster]
– Dream Psychology [Sigmund Freud]
– Tess of the d’Urbervilles [Thomas Hardy]
– Siddhartha [Hermann Hesse]
– Dubliners [James Joyce]
– The Fall of the House of Usher [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Arabian Nights [Andrew Lang]
– The Sea Wolf [Jack London]
– The Call of Cthulhu [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– Anne of Green Gables [Lucy Maud Montgomery]
– Beyond Good and Evil [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche]
– The Murders in the Rue Morgue [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Black Cat [Edgar Allan Poe]
– The Raven [Edgar Allan Poe]
– Swann’s Way [Marcel Proust]
– Romeo and Juliet [William Shakespeare]
– Treasure Island [Robert Louis Stevenson]
– The Elements of Style [William Strunk Jr.
Vol 3 finished keeping for the historical record
This book contains the following works arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names.
Starting with volume 3 then will go back and do volumes one, two, and the Harvard classics. The goal is to finish all of these by the end of next year. I almost finished Volume One. Will do some of the WC reading books as well.
– What’s Bred in the Bone [Grant Allen]
– The Golden Ass [Lucius Apuleius]
– Meditations [Marcus Aurelius]
– Northanger Abbey [Jane Austen]
– Lady Susan [Jane Austen]
– The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [Lyman Frank Baum]
– The Art of Public Speaking [Dale Breckenridge Carnegie]
– The Blazing World [Margaret Cavendish]
– The Wisdom of Father Brown [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– Heretics [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Donnington Affair [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– The Innocence of Father Brown [Gilbert Keith Chesterton]
– Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure [John Cleland]
– The Moonstone [Wilkie Collins]
– Lord Jim [Joseph Conrad]
– The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe [Daniel Defoe]
– The Pickwick Papers [Charles Dickens]
– A Christmas Carol [Charles Dickens]
– Notes From The Underground [Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
– The Gambler par Fyodor [Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky]
– The Lost World [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Hound of the Baskervilles [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Sign of the Four [Arthur Conan Doyle]
– The Man in the Iron Mask [Alexandre Dumas]
– The Three Musketeers [Alexandre Dumas]
– This Side of Paradise [Francis Scott Fitzgerald]
– Curious, If True: Strange Tales [Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell]
– King Solomon’s Mines [Henry Rider Haggard]
– The Hunchback of Notre Dame [Victor Hugo]
– Kim [Rudyard Kipling]
– Captain Courageous [Rudyard Kipling]
– The Jungle Book [Rudyard Kipling]
– Lady Chatterley’s Lover [David Herbert Lawrence]
– The Son of the Wolf [Jack London]
– The Einstein Theory of Relativity [Hendrik Antoon Lorentz]
– The Dunwich Horror [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– At the Mountains of Madness [Howard Phillips Lovecraft]
– The Prince [Niccolò Machiavelli]
– The Story Girl [Lucy Maud Montgomery]
– The Antichrist [Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche]
– The Republic [Plato]
– The Last Man [Mary Shelley]
– Life On The Mississippi [Mark Twain]
– The Kama Sutra [Vatsyayana]
– In the Year 2889 [Jules Verne]
– Around the World in Eighty Days [Jules Verne]
– Four Just Men [Edgar Wallace]
– Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ [Lewis Wallace]
– Jacob’s Room [Virginia Woolf]
Reading the Classics Updated Lists
Cosmos Reading List 2025 Updates
Medium
Substack
Substack Podcast
Spotify Podcast
Wattpad
The End
320
20
20
