Flashback, December 1925: Dreiser’s ‘An American Tragedy’ Attacks Inequality

After a quarter-century of penury and pain, novelist Theodore Dreiser achieved greater critical acclaim and financial security than he’d ever known with An American Tragedy, published a century ago this month by Horace Liveright.

In his debut 25 years before, Sister Carrie (whose difficult birth I described in this post from last month) and four subsequent novels (Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and The “Genius”), Dreiser had helped lead the literary genre of naturalism in the United States. 

But with An American Tragedy, the 54-year-old author launched a monumental assault on American inequality and the ills it bred—corruption, media sensationalism, restricted life choices, and criminality.

This new novel came at the end of a year in which two others were similarly critical of American materialism at the height of the Roaring Twenties. All remain uniquely relevant a century later.

The Pulitzer Prize winner for that year, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, satirized how the pursuit of profit could corrode even the most seemingly pure of occupations: medicine. And, as I noted in this post from 17 years ago on the real-life crime that inspired An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s plot contained some of the same elements as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: a poor boy from the Midwest, stifled by his environment and longing for all that money can buy, meets the woman of his dreams, only to become emmeshed in a crime that leads to his death.

Reflecting his journalism background, Dreiser conducted extensive research, both on the 1908 trial and execution of Chester Gillette and two other sensational murder cases: Harry Thaw’s shooting of architect Stanford White and the poisoning of Roland Molineux  (which figured in a novel he ultimately put aside called The Rake). The latter two cases fed his interest in what has become ghoulish media fascination with true-crime stories.

For the Gillette case, Dreiser ended up touring with his mistress (and eventual second wife), Helen Patges Richardson, towns in upper New York state that figured in the tragedy, while he also drew on love letters (introduced as evidence at trial) by the defendant’s pregnant lover, factory girl Grace Brown. His narrative contains major parallels to the case, including:

*the same initials for Gillette and protagonist Clyde Griffiths;

*the accused’s background as a poor relation hoping to use his rich industrial uncle’s status to catapult into high society;

*Brown’s drowning death in a boat on a lake; and

*the ambiguity involving Gillette’s guilt (significant enough still to be debated a century later).

Dreiser told readers everything—and I mean everything—about what led Griffiths to his fateful date with Roberta Alden on the lake. More than a few readers have wished he had spared them all of this detail (and, in the 1926 parody “Compiling an American Tragedy: Suggestions as to How Theodore Dreiser Might Write His Next Human Document and Save Five Years’ Work,” humorist Robert Benchley had wicked fun with his incurable verbosity, too).

Actually, in one important chapter, Dreiser did decide to forego legwork. Only a month before publication, the novelist urged his friend and literary champion, the iconoclastic columnist and editor H.L. Mencken, to use his influence to get him a pass to death row on Sing Sing, so he could more realistically convey Griffith’s experience in awaiting execution.

Liveright was undoubtedly relieved when nothing came of the request and his much-put-upon author—who’d been battling censors, low funds, chronic nausea, and headaches as he struggled with the project—could put the manuscript to rest. Dreiser himself came to feel it all was a blessing in disguise, telling Mencken, “my imagination was better—(more true to the facts)—than what I saw.”

Much like John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, when it was brought to the big screen in the Fifties, An American Tragedy would be carefully condensed by an expert director-screenwriting team (in this case, George Stevens, Michael Wilson, and Harry Brown) as A Place in the Sun. But Dreiser’s sprawling novel could have benefited—as Steinbeck’s family saga eventually did in the early 1980s—with a mini-series that would have depicted how an upbringing shaped and misshaped a key character.

This latter point may have been the entry point for Dreiser into Griffiths. Dreiser’s family was Roman Catholic rather than Protestant evangelical like Clyde’s, but the author and his character both chafed against what they regarded as their parents’ religious fanaticism and how it left children rootless and helpless in an increasingly secular modern America:

“Clyde's parents had proved impractical in the matter of the future of their children. They did not understand the importance or the essential necessity for some form of practical or professional training for each and every one of their young ones. Instead, being wrapped up in the notion of evangelizing the world, they had neglected to keep their children in school in any one place. They had moved here and there, sometimes in the very midst of an advantageous school season, because of a larger and better religious field in which to work. And there were times when, the work proving highly unprofitable and Asa being unable to make much money at the two things he most understood—gardening and canvassing for one invention or another—they were quite without sufficient food or decent clothes, and the children could not go to school. In the face of such situations as these, whatever the children might think, Asa and his wife remained as optimistic as ever, or they insisted to themselves that they were, and had unwavering faith in the Lord and His intention to provide.”

Much like Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Clyde is beset by a shallow imagination, leaving him prey to materialism and desire. Unlike the French novelist, Dreiser was incapable of compression or style.

Even so, An American Tragedy succeeds despite its graceless prose. In fact, George Orwell’s 1945 essay “Good Bad Books” insisted that, paradoxically, this grimly deterministic novel succeeded because of it, gaining something “from the clumsy long-winded manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection, and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up.”

For the remaining two decades of his life, Dreiser, a relentless critic of capitalism (indeed, he embraced Communism not long before he died), attempted what we would call “monetizing” or “leveraging” the novel that helped rescue him from a lifetime of grinding poverty, through stage and film adaptations. He did not see those efforts bear fruit in the classic A Place in the Sun. I will leave a discussion of that movie till 2026, in time for its 75^th anniversary.

This Day in Literary History (Chester Gillette’s “American Tragedy”)

March 30, 1908—At 6:14 am, 25-year-old Chester Gillette was executed for murdering pregnant lover Grace Brown on an Adirondack lake, giving rise to a century of speculation over what really happened on the afternoon of her death and—more important for our purposes here—a novel and movie generally acclaimed as classics of their genres: Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun, respectively. 

Unlikely as it might seem, two 1925 novels acclaimed for their critical examinations of the American Dream sound like the same tabloid story. Think about it: A young man of humble origins comes east, finds a job that leads to unforeseen complications, gets involved with a girl and a crime from this illicit involvement, then dies himself. 

You don’t notice it as much in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: Even though the thin plot, as H.L. Mencken noted, can read like “a glorified anecdote,” that soaringly romantic style pretty much waltzes you around the room with nary a misstep, leaving you exhilarated and wondering how it all went by so fast.

Consider this sentence, from the section on the party where Nick Carraway meets Gatsby: “The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher.” The book is filled with that—you’ll find it on just about any page. 

But it’s hard not to be aware of the tabloid source with Theodore Dreiser, whose sentences, when they’re not stepping all over your toes for what seem like an eternity, tell you what to think, backing you into a corner, practically pawing at you—much like the novelist’s hot pursuit of attractive women, no matter how insuperable the odds might have seemed against him (in his younger days, lack of money; in old age, the obvious; throughout adulthood, conspicuous ugliness). 

As evidence (and that’s the right word, considering the trial in the last part of his novel) of the contrast with Gatsby, I offer this, Clyde’s “genii of his darkest and weakest side,” answering his moral objections to murder: “Pah—how cowardly—how lacking in courage to win the thing that above all things you desire—beauty—wealth—position—the solution of your every material and spiritual desire.” 

Moreover, while the legal consequences of the fatal accident at the heart of Gatsby are resolved quickly (the eponymous hero is willing to take the rap for Daisy, then is gunned down in his pool), Dreiser devotes an extraordinary amount of attention to the trial of Chester Gillette’s fictional counterpart, Clyde Griffith. The former journalist knew that God (a concept he had otherwise rejected along with the Roman Catholicism of his childhood) was in the details. 

(Another point in common for the two novels: both were adapted by the Metropolitan Opera: Gatsby, by John Harbison; American Tragedy, by Tobias Picker.) 

An American “Crime and Punishment” 

It’s easy to see how the case of Gillette, with his feverish desire for sex and success, could have fascinated Dreiser—his own yearnings easily matched those of the callow young man at the heart of this upstate New York tale of crime and punishment. In Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945, biographer Richard Lingeman concludes that the novelist’s “profound loneliness” created in him “sympathy with the outsiders looking in, those who didn’t belong, who desire the light and warmth within the walled city.” 

Gillette’s family had been moderately prosperous, owning a hotel, restaurant and carting company, until his parents joined the Salvation Army. That meant, of course, giving up all worldly goods. 

Chester followed them, but as time went on became increasingly disillusioned with this life. Two relatives who remained prosperous arranged for him to attend Oberlin Academy, but he failed out. Eventually, he made his way to Cortland, N.Y., where he found a job in a skirt factory owned by an uncle and became the lover of Grace Brown, a farm girl. 

Newspaper accounts of the time wildly exaggerated the presence of a rich other woman in Gillette’s life. It’s unclear if Dreiser (who began following the case even while toiling away as a New York magazine editor) was aware of this example of yellow journalism, but it provided a perfect complication and motive for his character. 

Grace’s pregnancy created a crisis for Chester: she wanted to marry him and he wanted no part of it. In July 1906, the two took a boat trip on Big Moose Lake. Nobody knows exactly what happened next (partly because of a botched autopsy), but Grace’s corpse was later discovered in the lake. Gillette’s pattern of deceit (including an assumed name at the hotel where he stayed with Grace that matched his initials) quickly put him under suspicion. 

Subsequently, prosecutor George Ward insisted that Gillette, while alone on the lake with Grace, had struck her with a tennis racket and tossed her out of the boat. Gillette maintained that she had accidentally drowned and he had fled in panic, but motive and a mound of circumstantial evidence (tied together so tightly by Ward that his presentation would be used as a model in law schools for the next several decades) convinced a jury otherwise. Gillette was confined to Auburn State Prison before being executed a year and a half after the death of Grace. 

The Cultural Afterlife of a Bloody Death 

Fascination with the case did not die with Gillette. In particular, Dreiser would doggedly research it as background for his own novel. 

For all its manifest clumsiness, An American Tragedy solidified his reputation as America’s premiere realistic novelist, rescuing him from a period when his life was very much on the brink following a decade-long struggle with bluenoses and publishers (76 rejections of his work in 1918 alone). 

The photograph of Chester Gillette accompanying this blog, with its blank, unformed good looks, brings to mind Montgomery Clift and one of the central films in his short but influential career: A Place in the Sun. All of the actor’s anguished, inarticulate longings (with who knows how much of it related to a closeted existence he could not disclose) show up in his close-ups with Elizabeth Taylor. 

The sight of the two of them together made me wonder how they might have fared if director George Stevens had chosen to adapt The Great Gatsby instead of An American Tragedy. His 1951 adaptation of Dreiser is a triumph on virtually all counts, all the more impressive for following a 1931 version of the book that Dreiser loathed. For his skillful work, Stevens won a Best Director Oscar. 

If Stevens could have found the grace notes in Dreiser’s lumbering, brooding hulk of a novel, what might he have accomplished with a work that (to borrow Fitzgerald’s phrase) would have been “commensurate with his capacity for wonder”? Certainly the two leads might have made it easy to conjure up the haunted dreams of James Gatz, a counterpart if there ever was one to that other Heartland refugee, Clyde Griffith. And Shelley Winters could have made a fine, blowsy Myrtle Wilson. 

Most of all, with his mastery of movement (watch Clift stumble through the forest after Winters drowns) and sound (the victrola that comes to the end of a song, then keeps skipping, all the while suggesting the obliviousness of Clift and Winters as they make love off-camera), Stevens might have found a cinematic approximation of the Fitzgerald book that many believe is inherently unfilmable.

Two years ago, the centennial of the death on the lake that started all of this attracted a flurry of reporters journeying up to Herkimer County, N.Y. This year, attention has been renewed with Hamilton College’s publication of The Prison Diary and Letters of Chester Gillette, edited by Jack Sherman and Craig Brandon. Gillette’s writings are evidently silent on whether or not he killed his lover, but they are filled with accounts of his reading. 

Although Gillette’s letters to Grace read at the trial revealed a cold lover wanting out of his predicament, his diary—as one might expect for a young man pursuing all that life could bring—is filled, rather poignantly, with his aspirations (he dreamed about visiting Egypt and riding in a hot-air balloon).