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American Tragedy (Hardcover, 1972) Other Editions... Author: Theodore Dreiser Dreiser's huge, sprawling, clumsy, unquestionably powerful novel tells a story that could have been ...


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Format: Hardcover
ISBN-10: 0690003285
ISBN-13: 9780690003284
Mar 1972
Publisher: Ty Crowell Co
Language: English

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1960 - 70's SIGNET CLASSIC paperback. Pages clean, though tanned due to...

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Synopsis
Dreiser's huge, sprawling, clumsy, unquestionably powerful novel tells a story that could have been lifted directly from a tabloid newspaper. Clyde Griffiths, the son of narrowly religious parents, escapes his Kansas City upbringing at 16 by getting a job in his uncle's collar factory in upstate New York. Clyde convinces himself that he will become a man of fortune, and he courts an upper-class young woman, However, his plans are thwarted when he gets involved with a factory girl, Roberta, who becomes pregnant. Clyde's ambiguous killing of Roberta, and the consequences of his act, constitute a haunting study of crime, punishment, and fate.

Industry Reviews
"There's really nothing like it. It's America's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT."
Kirkus Reviews (01/15/2003)

"Dreiser is famous for indulging in gassy philosophical posturings, repetitions, wordiness and all kinds of gaucheries that are perhaps not as gauche as they appear; but beneath the seeming awkwardness he was, in his way, a writer of extreme discipline. The efficiency consisted of piling up tiny physical details and noting every possible petty motive and impulse in order to show that human events are driven by irresistible material forces--sometimes by the pressures of social class, sometimes by 'chemisms' from within the individual personality. The tiny details and physical urges grow denser and denser, the protagonist of AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, Clyde Griffiths, moves ever closer to the half-fumbled murder of his girlfriend and then toward his own execution, and you, the reader, sink ever deeper into your armchair of anxiety and dread. It is because everything seems so horribly unavoidable."
New Republic - Paul Berman (07/17/1995)

"Mr. Dreiser...has written AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY at this length and in this form because he cannot possibly write it in lesser length or other form. And this obstinacy...is the defect of his strength....He is a totally undisciplined, unorganized power--yet, on the evidence of this novel alone, nonetheless a power."
New York Times Book Review - Robert L. Duffus (01/10/1926)

"If you look at AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, which I've always considered the great American novel, the reason it's specifically an American tragedy is that the problem with the hero is that he sees love as basically a commercial endeavor. He wants to trade up. He finds this perfectly nice girl who wants to sleep with him and who loves him and whom he's very fond of and then he finds someone he likes better. And the only way he can get rid of the first girl is to kill her. That's the American tragedy."
Salon - David Mamet (10/24/1997)

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