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.

Flashback, November 1900: Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’ Released by Half-Hearted Publisher

When the publishing firm Doubleday, Page released Sister Carrie in November 1900, it was without publicity, reflecting the company’s growing doubts and lack of enthusiasm. 

Though an-house reader, novelist Frank Norris, enthusiastically recommended it, one executive or another must have had second doubts after taking it on, as Doubleday tried to offload it on another firm, until author Theodore Dreiser insisted that they were contractually obliged to put it out.

Praise on both sides of the Atlantic didn’t help the reception of the fictional debut of journalist Dreiser. Only a third of its first printing of 1,000 copies were sold, and Doubleday turned over what was left to a remainder house.

Little did anyone know that Sister Carrie would become a landmark in American literature, highlighting the rise of naturalism—a movement that viewed human beings as animalistic, subject to environmental and heredity forces, usually beyond their control. Free will played little to no role in characters’ actions.

If this sounds like a vision colored by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, you would be right. In depicting situations with the exactitude and objectivity of a scientist, Dreiser found a writing mode in which he could use to best advantage his skill as a fact-gathering journalist. 

(One key scene in Sister Carrie was based on a five-week Brooklyn trolley strike he had covered in 1895 for the New York World, when he actually rode the rails and observed clashes between union workers and scan drivers.)

Along with his champion Norris and Stephen Crane (another reporter-turned-fiction writer), Dreiser was one of the primary exponents of naturalism, revealing life among the lower classes to a degree most readers had never experienced.

As critical acceptance of this novel grew, it found its way into academe. Its relatively moderate length (roughly 500 pages) has facilitated its listing in many college American literature survey courses, and despite its massive size (900-plus pages), Dreiser’s later An American Tragedy also continues to be regarded as a classic.

Still, it is doubtful that any reader has enjoyed Sister Carrie. It’s not just that Dreiser lacked a sense of humor that could occasionally brighten his unrelentingly grim subject matter and worldview.

No, unlike Crane, Jack London, or European practitioners of naturalism like Emile Zola or Guy de Maupassant, Dreiser could not resist a hopelessly verbose, ham-fisted style, with clotted, cliched sentences.

When he mounted a rhetorical soapbox, not only do his chapter titles induce cringes (e.g., “When Waters Engulf Us We Reach for a Star”), but longer passages can strain credulity, as in this one introducing the title character, inexperienced teenager Carrie Meeber, traveling to the big city:

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

In tone, that was out of sync with a quiet mastery of detail that lent his narrative believability.

No stranger to temptations of the flesh, Dreiser recorded, with a candor unusual for the time, his characters’ sexual desire. Even before publication, he had only reluctantly yielded to the urging of his wife Sara and friend Arthur Henry to tone down some passages.

Originally, for instance, he wrote of Carrie, “Her dresses draped her becomingly, for she wore excellent corsets and laced herself with care….She had always been of cleanly instincts and now that opportunity afforded, she kept her body sweet."

Sara revised it to read, “Her dresses draped her becomingly. . . . She had always been of cleanly instincts. Her teeth were white, her nails rosy."

(Readers would not know what Dreiser originally intended his book to convey until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published an edition based on the author's uncut holograph version, containing 36,000 words more than what Doubleday released.)

Indeed, Dreiser made no moral comment on Carrie (or most of his characters, for that matter). He outraged self-professed guardians of public morality especially by not punishing her for living out of wedlock.

As time went on, Dreiser pushed harder against such censors, observing in one 1940 letter, “Any writer, artist, painter or sculptor, or thinker of any breadth of mind who wants to present reality is now being presented by a kept Press."

Readers should not be left with the impression that the sense of authority Dreiser displayed derived solely from his skill as a reporter. He also understood all too well, through his own situation and that of family members, the quandaries that Carrie and her lovers faced as they reached for opportunities for love and money in a big metropolis:

*Like Carrie, Dreiser left home as a teenager for life in a large city;

*His sister Emma, like Carrie, caused a scandal by eloping with a married man;

*Like Carrie’s lover George Hurstwood, Lorenzo A. Hopkins, the man whom Emma ran off to Montreal with, absconded with his employer’s money, before dying, broken and alcoholic, in New York.

*Like Hurstwood, Dreiser himself loved possessions and fancy restaurants.

Sister Carrie concluded in tragedy, with Carrie triumphant as a Broadway actress but unable to shake the emptiness inside, while Hurstwood killed himself in a flophouse. Real life mirrored fiction for the author: A year consumed by bitter quarrels with Doubleday ended even more bleakly, as Dreiser’s often improvident father died on Christmas Day.

With a plot and style unrelieved by humor, even of the dark variety, Sister Carrie is about as lighthearted as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

While this flaw can frustrate readers, it doesn’t negate what a milestone and achievement the book represented in American literature. As Dreiser’s biographer Richard Lingeman noted, the novelist exhibited "sympathy with the outsiders looking in, those who didn't belong, who desire the light and warmth inside the walled city."

(The image accompanying this post comes from William Wyler’s 1952 adaptation of Dreiser’snovel, with the title shortened to Carrie. Jennifer Jones, as the title character, sits between her current lover, Charles Drouet, played by Eddie Albert, on the right, and her future one, George Hurstwood, played by Laurence Olivier.)