In the Library
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser, 1925
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 26 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 3
- Length
- Length 354k words
£1.99
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Dusk—of a summer night.
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If you like this, try
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Hardy's Tess is destroyed by the same machinery of circumstance and judgment that closes around Clyde, another good-hearted person condemned by a world built to convict.
£1.99
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published the same year, Gatsby chases the same glittering wealth Clyde does, only Fitzgerald lets the tragedy stay lyrical where Dreiser insists on every ugly detail.
£1.99
About the book
On Big Bittern Lake, in the second before a rowboat tips, Clyde Griffiths almost saves the woman he came there to drown. He does not. Theodore Dreiser spends the whole first half of this enormous novel getting Clyde to that lake: a poor cousin among the rich Griffiths of Lycurgus, overseeing the collar girls in his uncle's factory and starving for the world his name almost buys him, torn between Roberta Alden, who works beneath him and is now pregnant, and Sondra Finchley, who is glittering and just within reach. What Dreiser understands, and makes unbearable, is that wanting can do the work of intending, that a man can arrive at murder without ever quite deciding to commit one. The state that tries Clyde needs a villain who chose; the book he actually lived in is far less clean. An American Tragedy does not excuse him. It simply refuses to let ambition, and the country that manufactures it, off the hook.