Making It New: 1900–1945 339of the world, the Cowperwoods and the Carries. Despite their obvious differences,
both Cowperwood and Carrie are described as innocents and soldiers of fortune,
destined to make their way in a world they never made, to fight in the name of
aspirations they can feel but cannot name – and, in the long run, to lose. That destiny
also belongs to Clyde Griffiths, the protagonist of An American Tragedy. This novel,
inspired by an actual murder case that occurred in 1906, tells the story of how Clyde
falls in love with Sondra Finchley, a rich girl who represents the elegance and wealth
to which he has always aspired. A poor boy himself, he hopes to marry Sondra. What
stands in his way is that another woman, Roberta Alden, just as poor as him, is
carrying his child. She demands that Clyde marry her; Clyde plans to murder
Roberta and takes her boating to fulfill his plans. He lacks the resolution to carry it
through but, when the boat accidentally overturns, Clyde swims away leaving
Roberta to drown. Dreiser is at pains to make Clyde a minimalist case. His very ordi-
nariness dictates his typicality, his status, both as an expression of an American pos-
sibility, and as an embodiment of our collective human smallness amid what is
called “the vast skepticism and apathy of life.” An elaborate scheme of incremental
repetition, and a welter of incidental detail, work to reveal Clyde as the image and
prisoner of a culture, hungering with its hunger, empty with its emptiness. As the
narrative shifts, too, between agonizing close-up and a distanced perspective that
reduces Clyde to insect size, the reader may share his cramped conditions and shabby
dreams and aspirations but he or she is also compelled to see the protagonist as yet
another orphan, like ourselves, drifting on the great stream of circumstance. Clyde
is not tragic in any traditional sense – that is the irony of the title. He has almost no
assertive will or compelling idea; the pivotal event of his life, the death of Roberta, is
an accident; in his passivity, rootlessness, and alienation even from himself he is no
more, and no less, than another man, and, in particular, another American. With a
compelling mixture of sympathy and criticism, Dreiser moves Clyde, in the first half
of An American Tragedy, toward a moment in his life that, while an accident, seems
inevitable, the sum of all his failures of will and understanding. Then, in the second
half, he shows in relentless detail how the trap of circumstance closes more tightly
and literally on his protagonist as he faces indictments, trial, conviction, and
execution. The result overall is a book that, like Sister Carrie, captures both the real
conditions of life, as Dreiser saw them, and what he termed “the restless heart of
man,” the necessity and the pathos of things. It is a tragedy, not in the traditional
sense, but because it registers what its author called “the essential tragedy of life,”
that man is “a waif and an interloper in Nature.” And it is an American tragedy
because, like other, later tragedies of this kind, it gives us a protagonist who is the
victim, not just of circumstance, but of his own circumscribed dreams – the trifles
of desire laid out for him by his culture.
While his rejection of conventional morality earned Dreiser the disapproval of
many readers and reviewers of the time, he was stoutly defended by such leading
cultural commentators as H. L. Mencken (1880–1956). Mencken was chiefly notable
for founding the detective magazine The Black Mask in 1920 and the influential
periodical The American Mercury in 1924 with the playwright George Jean NathanGGray_c04.indd 339ray_c 04 .indd 339 8 8/1/2011 7:53:48 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 48 AM