She sneaks back to Kansas City, where her mother helps her unbeknownst to the rest of the family, though Clyde does find out. Esta runs off with a man who, as we later learn, abandons her when she is pregnant. However, they are as unsuccessful at preaching as they are at parenting. Sadly, it is little read today, even though it was in Time Magazine’s 100 best English-language novels since 1923.Ĭlyde Griffiths is the son of a preacher couple, who go out on the streets of the Kansas City in the early part of the twentieth century with their four children, Clyde, his older sister, Hester (called Esta) and his younger brother and sister, Frank and Julia, to preach and sing on street corners. An American Tragedy, the great achievement of his later years, is a work of mythic force, at once brutal and heartbreaking.Home » USA » Theodore Dreiser » An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser: An American Tragedyĭreiser’s classic and long novel, based on a true story, may not be as powerful as it was when first published in 1925 but it is still an excellent realist novel. The sheer prophetic amplitude of his bitter truth-telling, in idiosyncratic prose of uncanny expressive power, continues to mark Dreiser as a crucially important American writer. Around Clyde, Dreiser builds an extraordinarily detailed fictional portrait of early twentieth-century America, its religious and sexual hypocrisies, its economic pressures, its political corruption. In Clyde Griffiths, the impoverished, restless offspring of a family of street preachers, Dreiser created an unforgettable portrait of a man whose circumstances and dreams of self-betterment conspire to pull him toward an act of unforgivable violence. Few novels have undertaken to track so relentlessly the process by which an ordinary young man becomes capable of committing a ruthless murder, and the further process by which social and political forces come into play after his arrest. Taking as his point of departure a notorious murder case of 1910, Dreiser immersed himself in the social background of the crime to produce a book that is both a remarkable work of reportage and a monumental study of character.

A tremendous bestseller when it was published in 1925, An American Tragedy is the culmination of Theodore Dreiser's elementally powerful fictional art.

Dreiser an american tragedy