L.R. Dorn

“But at the same time, Dreiser points in An American Tragedy to the significance of those very social connections in the creation of Clyde’s criminal motivation. In asking how Clyde Griffiths the murderer was formed, Dreiser takes a panoramic view of economic development and social change in the United States during the decades leading up to the 1920s. In particular, he views Clyde as the product of a certain kind of family during a certain historical period. Though the story of Clyde draws on accounts of an actual 1906 murder, Dreiser deliberately avoids exactly dating the story, and the book thus comments not on a specific moment, but on an American era.

The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser (Cambridge Companions to Literature) (p. 198). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.”
― Leonard Cassuto, The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser

“AMBITION. DESIRE. BETRAYAL. MURDER?”
― L.R. Dorn

“Other books depended less on personal contacts than on certain abiding concerns. Early in his career, Dreiser had become interested in a crime that he saw as a dark version of the American success motif: the murder of a woman who stood in the way of her lover’s dreams of social and material advancement through a more advantageous marriage. For An American Tragedy (1925) he investigated numerous case histories, many of them sensational murders involving well-known figures such as Roland Molineux and Harry Thaw. He finally settled on the 1906 Chester Gillette trial for the murder of Grace Brown that occurred in the lake district of upstate New York. The novel benefited from the popular interest in criminal biography, a form to which Dreiser’s masterpiece gave new life as the progenitor of documentary novels of crime such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.

The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser”
― Thomas P. Riggio, An American Tragedy

“The mood of Mason throughout the entire direct examination was that of a restless harrier anxious to be off at the heels of its prey— of a foxhound within the last leap of its kill. A keen and surging desire to shatter this testimony, to show it to be from start to finish the tissue of lies that in part at least it was, now animated him. And no sooner had Jephson concluded than he leaped up and confronted Clyde, who, seeing him blazing with this desire to undo him, felt as though he was about to be physically attacked.

Theodore Dreiser. An American Tragedy”
― Theodore Dreiser