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.