An American Tragedy | THEODORE DREISER | Literature | Classics | eBooks
An American Tragedy
by THEODORE DREISER
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Windows Vista / XP / 2000, Mac OS X Tiger Features
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Windows 98+, Tablet PC, Pocket PC 2003 Features
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An American Tragedy Summary:
| This big turbulent novel by Theodore Dreiser takes an unrepentant look at the sexual nonreticence of the day with a browsing hostility of traditional morality and organized religion. In this quagmire of conflicted standards, Dreiser presents Clyde Griffiths, an ordinary young man who is the discontented offspring of a family of street preachers. Readers are immersed in this social background so they can understand how social and political agencies become involved when Griffiths is accused of a vicious murder. Dreams of improving his economic status and social relevance maneuver Griffiths toward this unpardonable act. While he is also a victim of the deceptive benefits of a materialistic society, this pursuit of vacuous goals to riches, authority, and vanity does not bode well of its own accord. America's view of success leads to a destructive intensity in Griffiths as he comes in direct contact with lies, adultery, and, finally, homicide. Dreiser offers the reader complex insinuations about the extent of Clyde's guilt which result in an examination of sexual hypocrisy, financial pressures, and governmental dishonesty. Even to the end, before his execution, Clyde's inability to comprehend his own blame is a true representation of human nature. Dreiser's triumph is his talent to provide a magnificently ominous picture of how evil can sneak up on a situation and render it poisonous. |
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| Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) is nothing less than what it purports to be -- the harrowing story of a weak-willed young man who destroys himself, a villain who is also victim of the values of a deceptive, materialistic society. Dreiser patterned the story of Clyde Griffiths on a real-life murder that took place in 1906, a charming young social climber who killed his pregnant young girlfriend in order to romance a rich girl who had begun to notice him. A powerful murder story, An American Tragedy is much more than that. For Dreiser pours his own dark yearnings into the character of Clyde Griffiths, while grimly charting the young man's pitiful rise and fall as he pursues empty ambitions to wealth, power and satisfaction. The Indiana-born novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) has never been a dashing or romantic figure in American literature, and he has no Pulitzer or Nobel Prize to signal his importance. His big, rugged novels were shocking in their day -- unapologetic in their sexual candor, antagonistic to the norms of conventional morality and organized religion, often banned or suppressed -- and challenging still to readers. Yet the brooding force of his writing casts a deep shadow across modern American letters. At his best, in An American Tragedy, Dreiser examines the flip side of The American Dream in a gathering storm of a story that develops with a power echoing Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. Inspired by the novels of Balzac and the ideas of Spenser and Freud, Dreiser became one of America's greatest naturalist writers, and An American Tragedy retains its rocky intensity and its devastating view of American longing almost a century later. |
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