When Sinclair Lewis accepted his Nobel Prize in 1930, he said that Dreiser, “marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. His best novel, Sister Carrie, comes a respectable thirty-third on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best. You get to imagining Dreiser as some American golem, made from native mud. Critics who champion him do so because “dullness and stupidity must naturally suggest a virtuous democracy” (Trilling again).

Dreiser has “the awkwardness, the chaos, the heaviness which we associate with reality,” Lionel Trilling said. He is boorish, and dull, and a poor stylist (“rhetorical bungling” is how Sandy Petrey put it) he is self-made, and crude. If you read the critical literature, Theodore Dreiser is one giant American cliché. Sister Carrie first edition (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1900) Guest blog post by Anne Trubek, critic, blogger, and author of A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses Dimensions: 7.90in - 5.10in - 1.10in - 0.Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie: America’s pure product and the gift of a young virgin.Long hailed as one of the best novels of the twentieth century, Sister Carrie provides a panoramic view of the dynamic and relentless forces that still drive city life and American culture Book Details She escapes work in a factory by becoming the mistress of first one man and then a more successful one but ultimately leaves them behind for success and fame on the stage in New York. When Carrie Meeber runs away to Chicago, she has nothing to rely on but her beauty and a fierce determination to improve her life. Celebrated for the vibrant and gritty realism of its portrayal of city life, Sister Carrie also gave the world an unforgettable heroine-a thoroughly modern young woman who turned the traditional cautionary tale of the fallen woman on its head. When Theodore Dreiser's epic first novel stormed onto the literary scene in 1900, it was a breath of fresh air in more ways than one. This landmark novel about a small-town girl who runs away to the big city has been hailed as one of the greatest portraits of urban life in American literature.

Author of sister carrie