Dreiser returned to writing fiction and enjoyed some success until the Great Depression. After recovering, Dreiser became a successful editor for women’s magazines but was forced to resign after a scandal with his assistant’s daughter. Fortunately, his brother, Paul Dresser, arranged for Dreiser’s treatment in a sanitarium. Dreiser’s lack of success with the book and his marital troubles led him into a deep depression. Consequently, Sister Carrie sold fewer than 500 copies when it first came out.

However, the company was hesitant to do so, uncomfortable with the fact that the novel’s main character is never punished for her immorality, and thus decided to limit advertising for the novel. Dreiser began to write S ister Carrie in 1899 and Doubleday published the book. Dreiser married Sara White in 1898, but his extramarital affairs led them to permanently separate some 14 years later. Huxley, John Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer, and came to adopt a naturalistic worldview: humans are helpless and wholly subject to the influences of their environment. During these young adult years, he read T. After studying for a year at Indiana University, Dreiser became a reporter and moved to the East Coast. In this period, Dreiser also developed a profound desire for material wealth, something that would serve as inspiration for his works. This led Dreiser to associate his father’s lack of productivity with religion.

His father was a millworker who struggled to find employment and a strict adherent to Roman Catholicism. Somehow, despite the lack of sales and heavy criticism, Sister Carrie survived over a century to the modern day.Theodore Dreiser was born to a large, poor family in the American Midwest. There was also criticism over the sexual content it contained, which is laughable by today’s standards, but was shocking in 1900. Criticism at the time of the novel’s release centered around Dreiser’s writing style, which many found to be lacking and highlighted his own lack of education. Other praise centered around the novel’s realistic depiction of the human condition, with one review even stating Sister Carrie didn’t have “the slightest trace of sentimentality or pettiness”. The descriptions of life in New York and Chicago around the turn of the century were praised for how accurate they were, for better or worse. Most of the praise the novel received centers around the sense of realism in the novel. While Dreiser’s novel didn’t see much praise by the general public when it was first published, it did receive positive reviews and has been referred to as one of the greatest American novels.

1900 novel sister carrie