The 100 best novels: No 33 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)

Theodore Dreiser was no stylist, but there's a terrific momentum to his unflinching novel about a country girl's American dream



Robert McCrum introduces the series

Sister Carrie is one of several novels in this series that address the American dream, and it does so in a radical spirit of naturalism that rejected the Victorian emphasis on morality. In some ways it's crude and heavy-handed, blazing with coarse indignation, but in its day it was, creatively speaking, a game-changer. Later, America's first Nobel laureate, Sinclair Lewis, said that Dreiser's powerful first novel "came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman".

I will be the first to concede that Dreiser does not now look anything like their equal. He is no stylist, and yet the raw power of his narrative trumps the sometimes excruciating clunk of his prose. Saul Bellow, for instance, advised readers to take Sister Carrie at a gallop. There's no question Dreiser paints an intensely detailed, compelling and closely observed portrait of urban America at the turn of the 20th century a century in which the US would play such a decisive part.

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