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= An_American_Tragedy =
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Introduction
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'An American Tragedy' is a 1925 novel by American writer Theodore
Dreiser. He began the manuscript in the summer of 1920, but a year
later, abandoned most of that text. It was based on the notorious
murder of Grace Brown in 1906, and the trial of her lover, Chester
Gillette. In 1923, Dreiser returned to the project, and with the help
of his future wife Helen and two editor-secretaries, Louise Campbell
and Sally Kusell, he completed the massive novel in 1925. The book
entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2021.
Plot
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Clyde Griffiths is raised by poor and devoutly religious parents to
help in their street missionary work. As a young man, Clyde, to help
support his family, must take menial jobs as a soda jerk, then a
bellhop at a prestigious Kansas City hotel. There, his more
sophisticated colleagues introduce him to bouts of social drinking and
sex with prostitutes.
Enjoying his new lifestyle, Clyde becomes infatuated with Hortense
Briggs, who manipulates him into buying her expensive gifts. When
Clyde learns Hortense goes out with other men, he becomes jealous.
Nevertheless, he would rather spend money on her than to help his
sister, who had eloped, only to end up pregnant and abandoned by her
lover.
Clyde's life changes dramatically when his friend Sparser, driving
Clyde, Hortense, and other friends back from a secluded rendezvous in
the country in his boss's car, used without permission, hits a little
girl and kills her. Fleeing from the police at high speed, Sparser
crashes the car. Everyone but Sparser and his partner flee the scene
of the crime. Clyde leaves Kansas City, fearing prosecution as an
accessory to Sparser's crimes.
While working as a bellboy at an exclusive club in Chicago, he meets
his wealthy uncle Samuel Griffiths, the owner of a shirt-collar
factory in the fictional city of Lycurgus, New York. Samuel, feeling
guilt for neglecting his poor relations, offers Clyde a menial job at
the factory. After that, he promotes Clyde to a minor supervisory
role.
Samuel Griffiths's son Gilbert, Clyde's immediate supervisor, warns
Clyde that as a manager, he should not consort with women working
under his supervision. At the same time, the Griffithses pay Clyde
little attention socially. As Clyde has no close friends in Lycurgus,
he becomes lonely. Emotionally vulnerable, Clyde is drawn to Roberta
Alden, a poor and innocent farm girl working in his shop, who falls in
love with him. Clyde secretly courts Roberta, ultimately getting her
pregnant.
At the same time, elegant young socialite Sondra Finchley, daughter of
another Lycurgus factory owner, takes an interest in Clyde despite his
cousin Gilbert's efforts to keep them apart. Clyde's engaging manner
makes him popular among the young smart set of Lycurgus; Sondra and he
become close, and he courts her while neglecting Roberta. Roberta
expects Clyde to marry her to avert the shame of an unwed pregnancy,
but Clyde now dreams, instead, of marrying Sondra.
Having failed to procure an abortion for Roberta, Clyde gives her no
more than desultory help with living expenses while his relationship
with Sondra matures. When Roberta threatens to reveal her relationship
with Clyde unless he marries her, he plans to murder her by drowning
while they go boating. He had read a local newspaper report of a
boating accident.
Clyde takes Roberta out in a canoe on the fictional Big Bittern Lake
(modeled on Big Moose Lake, New York) in the Adirondacks, and rows to
a secluded bay. He freezes. Sensing something wrong, Roberta moves
toward him, and he unintentionally strikes her in the face with a
camera, stunning her and accidentally capsizing the boat. Roberta,
unable to swim, drowns, while Clyde, unwilling to save her, swims to
shore. The narrative implies that the blow was accidental, but the
trail of circumstantial evidence left by the panicky and guilt-ridden
Clyde points to murder.
The local authorities are eager to convict Clyde, to the point of
manufacturing additional evidence against him, and he repeatedly
incriminates himself with his confused and contradictory testimony.
Despite a vigorous (and untruthful) defense by two lawyers hired by
his uncle, Clyde is convicted, sentenced to death, and after an appeal
is denied, he is executed by electric chair.
Influences and characteristics
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Dreiser based the book on a notorious criminal case. On July 11, 1906,
resort owners found an overturned boat and the body of Grace Brown at
Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York.
Chester Gillette was put on trial, and convicted of killing Brown,
though he claimed that her death was a suicide. Gillette was executed
by electric chair on March 30, 1908. The murder trial drew
international attention when Brown's love letters to Gillette were
read in court. Dreiser saved newspaper clippings about the case for
several years before writing his novel, during which he studied the
case closely. He based Clyde Griffiths on Chester Gillette,
deliberately giving him the same initials.
The historical location of most of the central events was Cortland,
New York, a city situated in Cortland County in a region replete with
place names resonant of Greco-Roman history. Townships include Homer,
Solon, Virgil, Marathon, and Cincinnatus. Lycurgus, the pseudonym
given to Cortland, was the legendary law-giver of ancient Sparta.
Grace Brown, a farm girl from the small town of South Otselic in
adjacent Chenango County, was the factory girl who was Gillette's
lover. The place where Grace was killed, Big Moose Lake in the
Adirondacks, was called Big Bittern Lake in Dreiser's novel.
A strikingly similar murder took place in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania,
in 1934, when Robert Edwards clubbed Freda McKechnie, one of his two
lovers, and placed her body in a lake. The cases were so similar that
the press at the time dubbed the Edwards/McKechnie murder "The
American Tragedy". Edwards was eventually found guilty, and also
executed by electric chair.
The novel is a tragedy, Clyde's destruction being the consequence of
his innate weaknesses - moral and physical cowardice, lack of scruples
and self-discipline, muddled intellect, and unfocused ambition;
additionally, the effect of his ingratiating (Dreiser uses the word
"soft") social manner places temptation in his way, which he cannot
resist.
This novel is full of symbolism, ranging from Clyde's grotesque
description of the high, gloomy walls of the factory as an opportunity
for success, symbolizing how it is all a mirage, to the description of
girls as "electrifying" to foreshadow Clyde's destination to the
electric chair; Dreiser transforms everyday mundane objects to
symbols.
Dreiser sustains readers' interest in the lengthy novel (over 800
pages) by the accumulation of detail, and by continually varying the
"emotional distance" of his writing from Clyde and other characters,
from detailed examination of their thoughts and motivations to
dispassionate reportage.
Adaptations
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The novel has been adapted several times into other forms, and the
storyline has been used, not always attributed, as the basis for other
works:
* A first stage adaptation written by Patrick Kearney for Broadway
premiered at the Longacre Theatre in New York on October 11, 1926. In
the cast was actress Miriam Hopkins, who had not yet started her film
career.
* Sergei Eisenstein prepared a screenplay in the late 1920s, which he
hoped to have produced by Paramount or by Charlie Chaplin during
Eisenstein's stay in Hollywood in 1930. 'Foolish Wives' and 'Greed'
director Erich von Stroheim briefly considered directing a film
version in the 1920s. Dreiser strongly disapproved of the 1931 film
version directed by Josef von Sternberg.
* In April 1929, Dreiser agreed that German director Erwin Piscator
should produce a stage version of 'An American Tragedy'. Piscator's
stage adaptation premiered in Vienna in April 1932, and made its US
debut in April 1935 at the Hedgerow Theatre, Rose Valley. The play was
produced, as well, by Lee Strasberg at the Group Theatre in March
1936. A revival was produced by the Hedgerow Theatre in September
2010.
* In the 1940s, the novel inspired an episode of the award-winning
old-time radio comedy 'Our Miss Brooks', an episode known as "Weekend
at Crystal Lake", or "An American Tragedy". The episode revolved
around the characters' misinterpreting the intentions of biology
teacher Philip Boyton (played by Jeff Chandler), Connie Brooks's (Eve
Arden) high-school colleague and love interest. The characters fear
that Boynton plans to kill Miss Brooks during a leisurely weekend at
their boss's lakeside retreat. The episode was broadcast twice, on
September 19, 1948, and on August 21, 1949. The episode was also
repeated in 1955, when the show was a hit on both radio and
television.
* The 1951 Paramount Pictures film 'A Place in the Sun', directed by
George Stevens and starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and
Shelley Winters, is "[b]ased on the novel "An American Tragedy" by
Theodore Dreiser and the Patrick Kearney play adapted from the novel"
(quoted from film credits).
* Further television or film adaptations of 'An American Tragedy' have
been produced in Brazil ('Um Lugar ao Sol', TV series, 1959, director:
Dionísio Azevedo), Italy ('":it:Una tragedia americana"', Rai 1, 1962,
regista: Anton Giulio Majano), Czechoslovakia ('Americká tragédia', TV
series, 1976, director: Stanislav Párnický), Philippines ('Nakaw Na
Pag-ibig', film, 1980, director: Lino Brocka), USSR ('Американская
трагедия', 4 parts, Lithuanian Film Studio, 1981, director: Marijonas
Giedrys), and Japan ('Hi no ataru basho', TV series, 1982, director:
Masami Ryuji).
* Composer Tobias Picker adapted the material as an opera of the same
title, with a libretto by Gene Scheer. It premiered at the
Metropolitan Opera starring Nathan Gunn in New York on December 2,
2005.
* Critics and commentators have compared elements of Woody Allen's
film, 'Match Point' (2005), to the central plot of the novel.
* The novel was adapted as a musical of the same title by three-time
Tony Award-winning composer and lyricist Charles Strouse. It premiered
at Muhlenberg College, located in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on March
24, 2010.
* In Cuba, the novel has been adapted and broadcast by Radio Progreso
national broadcasting twice, in 1977 and 2001. The first of the
versions starred such renowned actors as Raul Selis (as Clyde), Martha
del Rio (Roberta), Miriam Mier (Sondra), Julio Alberto Casanova
(Gilbert), and Maggie Castro (Bertine).
* Jennifer Donnelly's 2003 young-adult novel, 'A Northern Light',
recounts the events from the narrative viewpoint of a young woman
working at the local camp.
* In 2021, the classic crime novel was reimagined in the form of a
fictional investigative docuseries in 'The Anatomy of Desire' by L. R.
Dorn, the pen name of screenwriting team Matt Dorff and Suzanne Dunn.
Awards
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In 2005, the book was placed in 'Times list of the top 100 novels
written in English since 1924.
Controversy
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In 1927, the book was banned in Boston, Massachusetts, due to sexual
content, abortion, and murder.
In 1933, it was burned by Nazis in Germany because it "deals with low
love affairs".
Further reading
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*[
http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/Guides4/Dreiser.html#Top 'An
American Tragedy': A Study Guide]
*[
http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=189§ion=notes Theodore
Dreiser: 'An American Tragedy'] The Library of America. Accessed on
October 28, 2005.
*[
http://www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2005/12/Features/Double_Exposure.html
"Double Exposure"], an article about differences between the two film
versions of 'An American Tragedy', in 'Opera News', December 2005, pp.
24-31.
License
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Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Tragedy
