Sister Carrie

No one ever accused Theodore Dreiser of being an elegant writer, but nearly every sentence in this book howls with things that elegance alone can't provide: desire, drive, hunger, power, exhaustion, and—always—the counting and clinking of money. Dreiser's great characters—the driven, desirable, desiring Carrie, the doomed Hurstwood—are the crossroads for these forces, and at times may seem almost impersonally so, but they are fully inhabited, and you may find yourself inhabited by them in turn, as I still am twenty years after I last read this novel. It's a period piece that feels as modern as ever.