Tom's Two Cents : An American Tragedy

An American Masterpiece

Recently when I reviewed and recommended Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, I realized that another major work of American literature was published that same year, 1925.  Written by Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy was in its day far more famous and influential than Gatsby.  Today the tables have turned and it is all but forgotten by the reading public, though it is still dutifully cited in major surveys of American literature of the 20th century.

Not surprisingly.  Next to Gatsby, a slight book of less than 200 pages, Tragedy is a ponderous tome of over 800 in a style that today would be considered almost unreadable.  Not that it's full of difficult words--far from it.  What becomes overly tedious is the author's need to leave out almost nothing in the telling of his story, plus his preference for gerunds (ing verbs) over active verb forms that may give his tale a sense of immediacy but also a very predictable redundancy .

All that being said, the work has a real sense of power that cannot be denied.  Like Gatsby, it tells the story of a young naive American's rise and fall through his aspiration to material success and his obsession with a woman, in this case two women, who create for him an insoluble dilemma.  Unlike most of today's novels, the book has virtually no sub-plots, focusing almost entirely on its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, and the three women in his life: his highly moral and religious mother and the two women he is torn between, Roberta Alden, a poor factory girl, who becomes pregnant with his child, and Sondra Finchley, the beautiful, wealthy society girl he falls madly in love with.  The pressures these women bring to bear upon Clyde are enough almost to make him commit murder and indeed the novel struggles with a great moral  question: is the desire to commit murder almost as great a sin as the act itself?

An American Tragedy is a novel filled with substantive and moral ideas, a work that forces the reader to think, and think deeply, about the role and nature of human existence.  Hardly any wonder then that it mostly stays on the shelf these days--like most everything else in our society readers want quick easy fixes!