An American Tragedy (1925)

...a thrillingly detailed social panorama onto which a vivid, sobering tale of ambition and murder and their consequences is painstakingly grafted. The tragedy is an “American” one because of its central action: the drowning of pregnant Roberta Alden by her lover Clyde Griffiths (based on a real 1905 murder case), ensuing from the latter’s seduction by “the American dream” of rising from humble origins to wealth and social success.

My suspicion is that Dreiser’s books (with the exception of “Sister Carrie”) are now considered too long for high-school students, too earnest for college literature classes, and too odd for many common readers. Dreiser’s reputation has always been vexed, and the long debate over his stature has been accompanied by a secondary debate—a malignant shadow of the first—devoted to the question of whether he could write at all.... The greatness of “An American Tragedy” is that Dreiser took this crime sensation and dissolved the violent but meaningless frame of the story into its innumerable constituent episodes: the social condition of murderer and victim and friends; the moments of obsession, doubt, and rage; the slowly forming moral hardness; the evasions, the hundred hesitations and velleities; the acts rejected as well as those committed. No such story is truly banal, Dreiser seems to be saying; there is only inadequate representation of what happened....“An American Tragedy” is clumsy and heavy-spirited, and dated in its sexual arrangements, yet it has an extraordinary dignity and power that carry one through the taffied, redundant sentences. A Samson who cut off his own hair, Dreiser struggled mightily with language without enjoying the resources of language. But he was a hero nonetheless.