Novel
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser · 1925
Opening lines
Dusk—of a summer night.
And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants—such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Clyde Griffiths, son of street evangelists, leaves the hymns and the poverty behind to become a bellhop in a big hotel in Kansas City, where he discovers other people's money. A car accident makes him flee; in Chicago, he meets a rich uncle, who hires him in his collar factory in Lycurgus and lodges him. Promoted to head of a workroom, he secretly sees a factory girl, Roberta Alden, despite the rules. When Sondra Finchley, an industrialist's daughter, introduces him to the city's wealthy youth, Roberta tells him she is expecting a child and is counting on marriage.
Context
The novel draws on a criminal case of 1906 in the State of New York, whose press cuttings the author kept for years; he collected similar ones. The book appears from Boni & Liveright in December 1925, in two volumes. Josef von Sternberg adapts it for the cinema in 1931, and Dreiser sues over the film without success; George Stevens makes another film from it in 1951.
Who it is for
A very long novel, in three books published in two volumes. Translated into French by Victor Llona as early as 1932.
Prizes and reception
The first great commercial success of its author; banned in Boston in 1927, burned by the Nazis in 1933.
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