The Princess of Arcady, the physical contrast between the two couldn’t have
been greater. Henry’s garden-green cover was imprinted with stalks of flow-
ers, while the flat dull red of Dreiser’s book made it—in the words of one
biographer—resemble a plumber’s manual. It has been said that Double-
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 5 8
day refused to advertise Sister Carrie. 40 Yet there is no evidence that the firm advertised A Princess either. In fact, if the issues of the New York Times
Saturday Review of Books between November and January are a reliable
gauge, Doubleday didn’t advertise any of its books. On the other hand,
the competition—Scribner’s, Macmillan, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Harper and
Brothers, Houghton, Mi›in, and Company, even McClure, Phillips, and
Company—ran full-page advertisements for their fall lists. The Novem-
ber 10 issue of Saturday Review would have been the time to strike for Sis-
ter Carrie, but the only book of lasting value to appear—under review—
in the journal that day was the first variorum edition of another book
suppressed in its day, Leaves of Grass. Some of the reviews of Sister Carrie
actually commented on the paucity of advertising, among them the re-
view in William Marion Reedy’s Mirror (which would publish “Butcher
Rogaum’s Door” in 1902) in its issue of January 3. And on January 16,
George Horton of the Chicago Times Herald, one of Henry’s former col-
leagues, asked “Why a firm that can get hold of such literature should ex-
pend all their resources in pushing such cheap and trite clap-trap as ‘An
Englishwoman’s Love Letters’ must remain a puzzle to everybody not in
the publishing business.”41
The Doubleday aªair would render Dreiser forever suspicious of pub-
lishers. In fact, he prepared to remember and to record it (not always faith-
fully) from the very beginning. He told Henry when the crisis first surfaced,
“If when better known and successful I should choose to make known this
correspondence, every scrap of which I have, even to letters of commen-
dation from others, the house of Doubleday would not shine so very
brightly.” To this end, he accumulated a scrapbook consisting of 245 let-
ters, including copies in his hand of Henry’s letters relating to the aªair,
which in fact are almost the only extant evidence of his friend’s assistance.42
He would also embellish his own artistic role, telling an interviewer for the
New York Herald in 1907, when the book was first reissued by another pub-
lisher, of his heroic struggle to complete it. “The story had to stop, and yet
I wanted in the final picture to suggest the continuation of Carrie’s fate
along the lines of established truths,” he was paraphrased as saying. “Fi-
nally, with note book and pencil I made a trip to the Palisades, hoping that
the change of scene would bring out just what I was trying to express.”
There, he said, he stretched himself out on one of its ledges. After two hours,
the inspiration finally came: “I reached for my note book and pencil and
wrote. And when I left the Palisades ‘Sister Carrie’ was completed.”43 This
account may be a cruel shorthand to both acknowledge and erase Henry’s
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 5 9
role in the ending, for his “sister” or sisters in A Princess of Arcady dwell in a convent facing the Palisades. We will never know what if anything Dreiser
changed in transcribing Henry’s letters, but this later account left his now
ex-friend completely out of the picture. Their falling out in 1902 no doubt
contributed to this, but earlier Dreiser may have chafed at the superior treat-
ment Henry had received from Doubleday.
Only Norris remained unscathed, or unrevised, in Dreiser’s memory of
the aªair, and even here he apparently made some comments in 1930 about
the writer’s conflict of interests. Although Dreiser also wrote a flattering in-
troduction to a reissue of McTeague about the same time, their relationship
was cut short when Norris died of peritonitis in 1902. A month after the
muted appearance of Sister Carrie, Dreiser sent Norris an autographed copy,
acknowledging his “earliest and most unqualified approval” and claiming
that his book was an “oªspring” he had “so generously fostered.” For his
part, Norris reiterated his admiration of Dreiser’s book. “I have read most
of her again,” he told Dreiser in thanking him for the book. “It is a true
book in all senses of the word.”44
–
Aside from Norris’s valiant statements and support, an American novel
couldn’t have appeared under more unpromising circumstances. The num-
ber of review copies Norris actually was allowed to send out may be exag-
gerated, but it was the only advertisement the book was going to receive.
As a result of the Doubleday reversal, word surely got out that Sister Car-
rie was not to be celebrated, or even noticed, in the literary press. No doubt,
after his experience with Dreiser, Howells had no qualms about ignoring
the book in Harper’s. Other mainstream journals that might have been ex-
pected to do reviews—the North American Review, the Atlantic Monthly,
the Critic, the Arena, the Literary Digest, the Review of Reviews, and curiously enough even Ainslee’s, where Dreiser’s friend Richard Duªy was the
editor—also ignored it. Outlook, Current Literature, and the Nation listed
the book as published but never reviewed it.45 Mainly, it was the newspa-
pers that reviewed Sister Carrie.
Part of the legend surrounding Sister Carrie was that the reviews were
overwhelmingly negative, but the fact is that of the handful that the first
edition received between November 20, 1900, and March 9, 1901—fewer
than thirty—more than a few hinted that despite the book’s colloquial lan-
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 6 0
guage and seamy plot, it was undeniably a rare example of literary genius.
“Here, at last, is, in its field,” wrote Horton in the Chicago Times Herald of
January 16, “a great American novel.” By “in its field,” he undoubtedly re-
ferred to naturalism with its focus on the more sordid aspects of American
life, such as in McTeague, which many condemned for its vulgarity in de-
picting the bestial natures of the main characters. Interestingly, one of the
reasons Doubleday may have shied away from Dreiser’s book was because
of the adverse reviews of McTeague (again for its subject matter, not its
power), which he had published when he was still a partner with McClure.
But what struck reviewers of Sister Carrie was how Dreiser managed to state
his case without either profanity or the use of explicit scenes like those found
in the underground literature of its day.
“It is a remarkable book,” said the Louisville Times of November 20,
“strong, virile, written with the clear determination of a man who has a
story to tell and who tells it.” Its coverage by New York reviewers was al-
most nil, but the New York Commercial Advertiser of December 19 referred
to its “extraordinary power” to tell a profound and moving story. Three
days later the Albany Journal called it “intensely human.” Up in New Haven,
the Journal-Courier of January 12 thought its “depth of insight into human
character [had] evidenced . . . a touch of Balzac’s strength and penetration.”
And out West, the Seattle Post Intelligencer of January 20 called Dreiser “a
new writer with endowments of a most unusual order. It seems not un-
likely that, if himself so wills it, he can stand at the head of American nov-
elists.” Complaints, sometimes the predominant feature of a review, were
aimed at Dreiser’s style (“the English is seldom good and frequently atro-
cious”), the title (“this oddly named story”), and that fact that the story
“was not a book to be put into the hands of every reader indiscriminately.”
Two reviewers recognized Dreiser’s borrowing from George Ade.
Two others observed that neither the word “God” nor “Deity” occurred
anywhere in its 557 pages, only “the godless side of American life.” Gener-
ally, reviewers objected to the idea that life had no deeper or higher mean-
ing than the accidental paths that Carrie and Hurstwood follow. Hurst-
wood’s drama was thought to be the greater strength in the book, but
ironically its force lay in the fact that the ex-manager falls for no better or
worse reason than that by which Carrie rises. He falls down and down and
nobody seems to care, not even God. Naturally, Hurstwood drew more sym-
pathy than Carrie. To many reviewers (all male in this case), Carrie was re-
garded as an irresponsible shopgirl who got lucky, but Hurstwood drew their
empathy. The Hartford Courant of December 6 thought that there was
s i s t e r c a r r i e
1 6 1
“nothing more impressive in the year’s novel writing” than the description
of Hurstwood’s last days and death. “There is hardly such another picture