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.)

Quote of the Day (Theodore Dreiser, on Words as ‘Vague Shadows’)

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.” —Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)

This Day in Pop Music History (Paul Dresser, Tunesmith Brother of Theodore Dreiser, Dies Broke)

January 30, 1906--Paul Dresser, once the toast of Broadway with hugely successful songs such as “On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away,” “The Letter That Never Came” and “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,” died penniless at age 47 in the New York apartment of his sister Emma.

Dresser’s scores of tunes eventually led to his posthumous election to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and he also played a role in the rise of Tin Pan Alley as part owner of the music publishing company Howley, Havilland & Dresser.

But he also heavily influenced the life and work of the brother 13 years his junior, author Theodore Dreiser.

That concept might seem preposterous to anyone comparing backslapping, wisecracking Paul (who changed the spelling of his surname after leaving home to join a male quartet that traveled with a medicine wagon), whose sentimental songs were composed for a middle-class audience, with Theodore, an increasingly radical, plodding, humorless writer who nevertheless transformed American literature with his grimly naturalist novels.

But none other than the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy claimed, in his affectionate essay “My Brother Paul” (reprinted in his 1919 collection, Twelve Men) that following their revered mother’s death, the only member of his large family “who truly understood me, or, better yet, sympathized with my intellectual and artistic point of view, was, strange as it may seem, this same Paul, my dearest brother.” There is every reason to take the novelist at his word on this point.

Dreiser’s raw depiction of the lower depths has obscured an aspect of his fiction noted by early champion H. L. Mencken, who pointed out in a 1911 review that the title characters of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt “escape from the physical mysteries of the struggle for existence only to taste the worse mysteries of the struggle for happiness.” The case of Paul Dresser illustrated this as much as anything else in his brother’s life.

Like Carrie and Jennie, Paul rose from Midwest poverty to ever-greater heights. Leaving his native Indiana behind, he lived large in Gotham. (Literally so: as seen in the image accompanying this post, he weighed more than 300 pounds.)

It’s tempting, in fact, despite differences in racial backgrounds, to liken Paul to some contemporary hip-hop moguls who have parlayed careers in one area into wider-ranging endeavors. As Theodore observed, Paul at one time or another had been “a singer and entertainer with a perambulating cure-all or wagon (‘Hamlin’s Wizard Oil’)…both end- and middle-man with one, two or three different minstrel companies of repute; the editor or originator or author of a ‘funny column’ in a Western small city paper; the author of the songs mentioned above and a hundred others; a black-face monologue artist; a white-face ditto, at Tom Pastor’s, Miner’s and Niblo’s of the old days; a comic lead; co-star and star in such melodramas and farces as ‘The Danger Signal,’ ‘the Two Johns,’ ‘A Tin Soldier,’ ‘The Midnight Bell,’ ‘A Green Goods Man’ (which he wrote, by the way) and others.”

And then the bottom fell out. Paul’s easy way with money--spending perhaps even more freely, on down-and-out entertainers who needed a helping hand, as on himself--along with poor business sense and inability to adjust to the changing tastes of an increasingly polyglot New York, led to bankruptcy. But worse was that the friends who had crowded around him once were nowhere to be found now: “Depression and even despair seemed to hang about him like a cloak,” Dreiser wrote. “He could not shake it off. And yet, literally, in his case there was nothing to fear, if he had only known.”

From first to last, Dreiser’s characters are gripped by yearnings for success and sex so insistent as to overwhelm all moral codes and laws. His brother opened up to him the breathtaking urban kingdom that offered these temptations.

Dreiser’s style can be heavy, awkward and sometimes fatuous (e.g., Sister Carrie claims that for a young girl leaving home for the big city, there are only two alternatives: “Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse”). But at times, caught up in the wonder of what he describes, it inextricably takes flight, as in this description of his brother’s routine that captures the fast pulse of a city awakening to its destiny at the center of the 20th century:

“He rose in the morning to the clang of the cars and the honk of the automobiles outside; he retired at night as a gang of rapid men under flaring torches might be repairing a track, or the milk trucks were rumbling to and from the ferries. He was in his way a public restaurant and hotel favorite, a shining light in the theater managers’ offices, hotel bars and lobbies and wherever those flies of the Tenderloin, those passing lords and celebrities of the sporting, theatrical, newspaper and other worlds, are wont to gather.”

Paul did not begin his brother’s sexual education, but the entertainment demimonde to which he exposed Theodore inevitably shaped the novelist’s views on women. The novelist was astonished not merely by Paul’s “catholicity of taste” but also by the brazen dress and manners of those who sought the songwriter’s favors: “They were distant and freezing enough to all who did not interest them, but let a personality such as his come into view and they were all wiles, bending and alluring graces.”

Judging from his own compulsive philandering, Dreiser could not have come away from such encounters with much respect for women. In 1909, the same year of his essay about Paul, the novelist became involved with a ruinous relationship with the 17-year-old daughter of an assistant editor at the publishing house where he worked. Over the years, he came to conduct several affairs at once.

Paul Dresser's work has not enjoyed the continuing popularity of a New York music forebear, Stephen Foster, but at least during his lifetime, Dreiser did live to see renewed appreciation for his brother's work. "On the Banks of the Wabash" became the state song of Indiana, and several years before the novelist's death he worked assiduously in Hollywood to bring to the big screen a biopic about his songwriting brother, My Gal Sal.

Audiences of the time would have been horrified by the notion that the song that inspired the 1942 musical starring Victor Mature and Rita Hayworth was based on a madam with whom Paul Dresser lived for a time in Evansville, Ind.--but the tunesmith's brother, having seen so much of the dark side of life, could hardly have been bothered by this at all.

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).