This essay argues that Sister Carrie should be understood as a reworking for the American scene of the nineteenth-century European realist novel of ambition, which Theodore Dreiser, as an autodidact, had access to primarily through his youthful reading of Honoré de Balzac, especially The Wild Ass's Skin [La Peau de chagrin] (1831) and Father Goriot [Le Père Goriot] (1835). While most previous critics have seen the influence of Balzac on Dreiser as a mostly settled matter, with Dreiser's early exposure to Balzac's novels supposedly shaping how the American wrote and not the content of what he wrote, in this essay I will show that “Dreiser's debt to Balzac,” as Nancy Warner Barrineau has termed it, is much greater.1 We should regard Dreiser's first novel not merely as influenced by his prior reading of Balzac's The Human Comedy, but as a conscious, sometimes nearly explicit...
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