An American Tragedy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  SOUVENIR

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  THEODORE DREISER was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871. He received his early education in public schools and later attended Indiana University. He began his writing career as a newspaperman, working in Chicago, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. In 1907, he was appointed editor-in-chief to the Butterick Publications in New York City. Meanwhile, his first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), had been released by a publisher who thought it objectionable and made little effort to promote its sale; however, some review copies were distributed and the book managed to attract the attention of many prominent writers. With the publication of The Financier (1912), a novel based on the life of Charles T. Yerkes, Dreiser was able to give up newspaper work and devote himself to writing. The “Genius” (1915), a novel of the egocentric artistic personality, was banned, but a year later a petition protesting this was signed by almost five hundred American writers. An Amercian Tragedy (1925), based on an actual criminal case history, brought the author widespread recognition and popularity. It was successfully dramatized by Patrick Kearney. In 1944, Dreiser was awarded the Merit Medal for Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He published little during the later years of his life, but The Bulwark (1946) and The Stoic (1947) appeared posthumously, both showing his later interest in religious philosophy. He died at his home in southern California in 1945.

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  Published by Signet Classic, an imprint of New American Library,

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  Published by arrangement with the Dreiser Trust.

  First Signet Classic Printing, September 1964

  Signet Classic Printing (Lingeman Foreword), August 2000

  Copyright © Horace Liveright, Inc., 1925 Copyright © Theodore Dreiser, 1926 Copyright © Helen Dreiser, 1953 Foreword copyright © Richard Lingeman, 2000

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-101-10029-5

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  Introduction

  On September 6, 1920, Theodore Dreiser noted in his diary: “I work on ‘An American Tragedy’ till 4 P.M.” He was living obscurely in Hollywood when he began writing the novel considered to be his greatest and one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century. At 49, he was at a low point in his career. His last novel, The “Genius,” had appeared five years ago; it had been banned in New York state as obscene and withdrawn from the market by its publisher. His earlier books were out of print. His short stories were regularly rejected by timid magazine editors fearful that their sexual frankness would offend readers.

  Such a charge was nothing new; it had plagued Dreiser’s career since his first novel, Sister Carrie, in 1900 was condemned by its unwilling publisher as “immoral.” It was later reissued and this time hailed for its powerful, unrelenting honesty. Younger writers seeking a more truthful kind of writing than the idealistic fiction that dominated the best seller lists rallied behind Dreiser and the banner of Realism. He followed Carrie with Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier and The Titan, which were championed by the younger critics, most vociferously H.L. Mencken, then an obscure Baltimore journalist, who would become America’s most influential literary and social critic of the 1920s.

  During World War I, Dreiser and Mencken, both second-generation Americans of German descent, were castigated by super-patriots as pawns of the b
rutal Hun. Mencken’s political commentary was silenced; Dreiser became persona non grata at many magazines. His mind turned to more alienated characters and psychopatholoy, and he wrote an unproducable play about a child murderer.

  Exploring the psychopathogical depths led him to the theories of Sigmund Freud. Dreiser called the Viennese doctor’s ideas “a strong, revealing light thrown on some of the darkest problems that haunted and troubled me and my work.” He sought out Dr. A.A. Brill, Freud’s American translator and a student of the criminal mind. They spent long evenings drinking beer and discussing what made murderers tick. Dreiser was now urgently meditating a novel about a murderer, the germ of An American Tragedy.

  As far back as 1907 he told friends he wanted to “get inside the skin of a murderer.” He made several attempts over the ensuing years to write such a novel, each with a different protagonist, but abandoned all of them because the characters refused to come to life. But the theme continued to obsess him, and he kept searching for a murder case that would serve as a model.

  He collected in his researches, he later claimed (with some exaggeration), nearly a dozen examples of what he regarded as a peculiarly American crime. These were emblematic murders, not necessarily typical ones. Dreiser was seeking a kind of murder that served as a metaphor for an illness besetting American society. Such a murder, said Dreiser, involved an ambitious young man who murders a woman with whom he has a relationship and who stands in the way (often she is pregnant by him) of a more advantageous marriage to a rich woman with whom he has fallen in love. Such killers were motivated by the American dream of wealth and success; they were trying to rise to a higher social and economic level and thus, “really doing the kind of thing which Americans . . . would have said was the wise and moral thing for him to do had he not committed a murder,” Dreiser wrote.

  The case most aptly tailored to his specifications turned out to be the 1906 murder of Grace (Billy) Brown by Chester Gillette, who had worked with her in a skirt factory in Cortland, New York. Chester had seduced Billy and made her pregnant. She demanded that he marry her but by then he was running with women in a higher social set; he regarded Billy as an obstacle to his rise and resolved to eliminate her. One July day he took her out in a rowboat on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, struck her with an oar and overturned the boat, leaving her to drown.

  The trial was a sensation—the O.J. Simpson case of its day without the racial angle or the international media attention, though it was lavishly covered by the New York tabloids. The dramatic high point came when the prosecutor read the poignant letters Grace Brown wrote to Gillette begging him to marry her; her simple words stirred universal sympathy and hatred of Gillette. A jury of conservative farmers and shopkeepers handed down a verdict of murder, and Gillette was duly electrocuted, despite serious irregularities in his trial. Shortly before his execution he confessed that he had indeed done in poor Billy.

  Dreiser had clipped newspaper accounts of the Gillette-Brown murder and decided it was the “ideal” case he had been searching for. Also, Dreiser felt a deeper psychic kinship with Gillette than he had with the other murderers on his roster. He saw in the callow, aimless youth intimations of his own younger self, which he had described in his recently completed autobiography, Newspaper Days. There he paints his career as a young newspaper reporter, learning the grim facts of life as he roams various cities, tormented by sexual desire and dreams of success. There is a scene of himself standing on an avenue of wealthy homes in Cleveland, “envying the rich and wishing that I was famous or a member of a wealthy family, and that I might meet with one of the beautiful girls I imagined I saw there and have her fall in love with me.” Like Gillette, Dreiser had grown up in a poor family: Gillette’s parents were religious workers; Dreiser’s father was fanatically religious and repeatedly failed in business; his pretty sisters were in and out of trouble, seduced and abandoned by wealthy small-town sports or older rakes.

  As a poor boy in his native Indiana Dreiser read avidly the Horatio Alger stories and other self-help books about success. Unlike Chester Gillette, however, he had the talent, intellect and drive to achieve it. But although he had climbed to journalistic and literary success in a manner that exemplified the American dream, he never forgot the hurts and humiliations, the ostracism and contempt he and his family endured in small-town Indiana. His skeptical mind also perceived a darker side of the Alger myth. He believed that it echoed a national obsession with money and social climbing, which promoted greed, pride and self-indulgence. It also bred unfairness: He saw worthy young men who rose in life but many more who failed because proper training and education were denied them by an accident of birth. The game was rigged to favor their wealthier peers.

  In these emblematic American murder cases Dreiser studied, sexual desire was a motive force operating in tandem with ambition. The young man seduced “Miss Poor,” made her pregnant and killed her after “Miss Rich” came along. Dreiser regarded the dominant religious morality that condemned to disgrace a young woman who is pregnant out of wedlock as harsh and unnatural, a puritanical punishment for expressing normal and natural urges. And why force two young people who by then probably despise each other into marriage?

  Dreiser had personal experience with the hurts and cruelties of sexual passion. He was a man with a strong erotic nature who had ditched a conventional small-town wife and sought sexual freedom in Greenwich Village. He engaged in a series of intense affairs with “liberated” young women drawn to his fame as the author of boldly realistic novels. Most of these “New Women,” however, sought to possess Dreiser, as his first wife had done; and he would resist their attempts to tie him down—resulting in fierce quarrels. He formulated the theory that in these affairs one party was the lover and the other the beloved, and the latter always has the upper hand. “Life is made for the strong,” he wrote in his diary. “There is no mercy in it for the weak—none. . . . Such is the tragedy of desire.”

  It was against the psychosexual background that Dreiser interpreted the facts of the Gillette-Brown murder, when he started writing An American Tragedy. In it he would describe the awakening sexual desire of Roberta Alden—Grace Brown’s counterpart—for Clyde Griffiths, who is Chester Gillette, as the “blinding, bleeding stab of love.” And when Clyde is first mesmerized by the spoiled, wealthy Sondra Finchley (vaguely inspired by one of Chester’s upper-class girl friends, though there was really no single “Miss Rich” in his life) because she embodies his dreams of wealth and beauty, he feels the “stinging sense of what it was to want and not to have.” An American Tragedy is a tragedy of desire, as well as a tragedy of ambition.

  Until he launched the Tragedy, Dreiser had been mired in a creative slough, unable to finish another long-planned novel, The Bulwark. At this nadir an unlikely savior appeared, a former manufacturer of paper goods turned publisher. His name was Horace Liveright, and he would become one of the most influential and gaudiest bookmen of the 1920s. Liveright believed in “advanced” literature and sought out Dreiser as the leader in the fight for a more mature American fiction. He offered Dreiser enough money to live on for a year in order to finish The Bulwark and Dreiser accepted.

  Money in hand, Dreiser and his mistress, Helen Richardson, an aspiring actress, clandestinely departed—both of them were still married to others—for Hollywood. The town was humming with the explosive expansion of the silent film industry, the balmy air laden with sensuality, the studios grinding out steamy fantasies of sin and luxury—a “mining camp in Lotus Land,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase. Helen made the rounds and landed small roles while Dreiser attempted to write screenplays with no success. He worked sporadically on The Bulwark, but his attitude toward the central character had changed, and he gave it up. Back in New York City, Horace Liveright kept yelling, where is the novel? Dreiser’s answer was An American Tragedy.

  Neither Liveright nor Dreiser could know that it would be another five years before the novel was completed. Dreiser hit a dea
d end in Hollywood and returned to New York where he toured sites associated with the Gillette-Brown murder and poured over accounts of the trial in the files of the New York World. Then he began again. The book would become “a terrible thing,” an “unholy task,” he complained.

  Finally, on November 25, 1925, it was done. He had curbed some of his stylistic excesses to focus on his tale, and the result seemed almost foreign to him, “a monumental failure.” Yet deep down he knew that he had achieved something big. What the public and the critics would think was another matter, however. He had experienced too many setbacks over the course of his career to place his expectations too high.

  An American Tragedy is a novel about a murder that not only illuminates the dark regions of the criminal mind, but plays a searchlight across the landscape of American society. Dreiser assembles a variegated yet representative gallery of American types to tell his tale—male, female, rich, poor, working-class and rural, urban sophisticates and magnates of industry, delinquents and officers of the law, unbelievers and sincere religious folks—all sketched with insight and sympathy.

  If An American Tragedy has an underlying social theme it is the powerful hold of status and social ambition on Americans in all levels of society and the cruelities and injuries the class system can inflict. In Dreiser’s novel this system is viewed mainly from the underside, through the eyes of Clyde Griffiths, who is lifted out of lonely obscurity and almost magically given a chance to dwell in the “splendiforous” sphere of the wealthy—if he will but murder the sweet and good Roberta Alden, whom he once loved.

  Dreiser probes with a concealed stiletto of irony the permutations of class distinctions in a society founded, after all, on the principle that “all men are created equal.” Clyde’s course has been determined at birth, in Dreiser’s view. Brought up in a family of penniless and unworldly religious workers, he hungers for the comforts and pleasures others have and finally rebels, going to work in a Kansas City hotel where he is introduced to the forbidden pleasures of sex and gains a keyhole view of the rich and near-rich off guard and at play. Clyde lacks the knowledge and guidance that might have directed his mind to a trade or profession that would have enabled him to rise in life. Instead, he caroms from one situation to another, an aimless pinball, anonymous, soulless, pleasure-seeking, vaguely dreaming of a finer life, hoping for some boost from fortune that will enable him to rise. His wish is granted when he is befriended by a wealthy uncle, Samuel Griffiths, who owns a collar and shirt factory in Lycurgus, New York.