1900 Wisconsin farm girl Carrie Meeber comes to Chicago to find work. On the train she meets Charles Druet, a slick travelling salesman, with whom she eventually moves in after a debilitating bout of factory work. Druet introduces Carrie to George Hurstwood, manager of Fitzgerald and Moy’s bar, ‘the finest resort in town’ and a ‘way-up, swell place’, according to Druet.
Before long, impressed by his savoir faire and elegant clothes, Carrie has started an affair with Hurstwood. One night while closing the bar, the manager is tempted by the cash in the safe. He picks it up, but when he tries to return it, finds that the safe door has closed.
He and Carrie have to flee, first to Montreal, then to New York, where Hurstwood takes up various unsatisfactory jobs and Carrie gets increasingly bored and restless. As a successful actress she meets wealthy patrons of the arts, including Robert Ames, a handsome young scholar who lectures her on the futility of material possessions, while having plenty himself. Hurstwood, meanwhile, loses his job, can’t pay his rent, lives on the streets, and finally commits suicide in a flophouse.
As the men in her life fall away, are ruined or worse, Carrie ascends the ranks of fortune, sophistication and success. She isn’t happy, but unlike other fictional fallen heroines – Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dickens’s Lady Deadlock – she at least comes out alive.
Submitted to the prestigious New York publishers Doubleday and Page, the manuscript of Sister Carrie was strongly backed by the firm’s reader, the California naturalist Frank Norris. Walter Page agreed to publish, but when Frank Doubleday got back from a trip to Europe he was much less keen on the project. Rumour has it, though it has never been documented, that it was his wife who found the book especially repugnant.
In the event, the publishers honoured their verbal agreement, came to contract and brought the book out after the author had made a few adjustments to assuage middle-class respectability – but he kept to his chief innovation, that Carrie was the first fallen heroine in the history of the novel whom the author didn’t feel compelled to kill off by having her die of consumption in a graveyard or jump in front of a train.
The first-edition print run of 1,000 copies sold only about half. Doubleday and Page didn’t push the marketing.