About the author and the novel(2)-《嘉莉妹妹 》书评

He read constantly, like one of his own helpless characters, he dreamed of wealth and social success in the great metropolises. When he was eighteen, a sympathetic teacher helped him enter the University of Indiana, but Dreiser quitted after a year and returned to Chicago, where he embarked on another sseveral of menial jobs and wandered the city streets at night, storing up impressions of drunks, thieves, prostitutes, and beggars. Dreiser's own experience in Chicago and New York were the perfect materials for the story of a poor country protagonist who comes to the city to seek whatever she can find. The heroin of the novel is Carrie Meeber, who leaves her rural home to try her fortune in Chicago. '