An American Tragedy
An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy Introduction

by Theodore Dreiser

Clyde Griffiths is a young man with ambitions. He’s in love with a rich girl, but it’s a poor girl he has gotten pregnant, Roberta Alden, who works with him at his uncle’s factory. One day he takes Roberta canoeing on a lake with the intention of killing her. From there his fate is sealed. But by then Dreiser has made plain that Clyde’s fate was long before sealed by a brutal and cynical society. The usual criticism of Dreiser is that, line for line, he’s the weakest of the great American novelists. And it’s true that he takes a pipe fitter’s approach to writing, joining workmanlike sentences one to the other. But by the end he will have built them into a powerful network, and something vital will be flowing through them.

An American Tragedy BOOK ONE

An American Tragedy Chapter 1

An American Tragedy Chapter 2

An American Tragedy Chapter 3

An American Tragedy Chapter 4

An American Tragedy Chapter 5

An American Tragedy Chapter 6

An American Tragedy Chapter 7

An American Tragedy Chapter 8

An American Tragedy Chapter 9

An American Tragedy Chapter 10

An American Tragedy Chapter 11

An American Tragedy Chapter 12

An American Tragedy Chapter 13

An American Tragedy Chapter 14

An American Tragedy Chapter 15

An American Tragedy Chapter 16

An American Tragedy Chapter 17