An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) 📕
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Clyde Griffith’s parents are poor street-preachers, but Clyde doesn’t “believe,” and finds their work demeaning. At fifteen he gets a job and starts to ease out of their lives, eventually landing in some trouble that causes him to flee the town where they live. Two years later, Clyde meets his well-off uncle, who owns a large factory in upstate New York. Clyde talks his way into a job at the factory, and soon finds himself supervising a roomful of women. All alone, generally shunned by his uncle’s family, and starved for companionship, he breaks the factory’s rules and begins a relationship with a young woman who works for him. But Clyde has visions of marrying a high-society woman, and fortune smiles on him in the form of the daughter of one of his uncle’s neighbors. Soon Clyde finds himself in a love triangle of his own making, and one from which he seems incapable of extracting himself.
A newspaperman before he became a novelist, Theodore Dreiser collected crime stories for years of young men in relationships with young women of poorer means, where the young men found a richer, prettier girl who would go with him, and often took extreme measures to escape from the first girl. An American Tragedy, based on one of the most infamous of those real-life stories, is a study in lazy ambition, the very real class system in America, and how easy it is to drift into evil. It is populated with poor people who desire nothing more than to be rich, rich people whose only concern is to keep up with their neighbors and not be associated with the “wrong element,” and elements of both who care far more about appearances than reality. It offers further evidence that the world may be very different from 100 years ago, but the people in it are very much the same.
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- Author: Theodore Dreiser
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“Oh, don’t say eat to me!” exclaimed Greta Miller, who was surveying Clyde calmly as though she were debating with herself whether he was worthwhile game or not, and deciding that he was: “With all the ice-cream and cake and pie and sandwiches we’ll have to eat yet tonight. We was just going to warn Louise not to fill up too much. Kittie Keane’s givin’ a birthday party, you know, Tom, and she’ll have a big cake an’ everythin’. You’re comin’ down, ain’t you, afterwards?” she concluded, with a thought of Clyde and his possible companionship in mind.
“I wasn’t thinkin’ of it,” calmly observed Ratterer. “Me and Clyde was thinkin’ of goin’ to a show after dinner.”
“Oh, how foolish,” put in Hortense Briggs, more to attract attention to herself and take it away from Greta than anything else. She was still in front of the mirror, but turned now to cast a fetching smile on all, particularly Clyde, for whom she fancied her friend might be angling, “When you could come along and dance. I call that silly.”
“Sure, dancing is all you three ever think of—you and Louise,” retorted Ratterer. “It’s a wonder you don’t give yourselves a rest once in a while. I’m on my feet all day an’ I like to sit down once in a while.” He could be most matter-of-fact at times.
“Oh, don’t say sit down to me,” commented Greta Miller with a lofty smile and a gliding, dancing motion of her left foot, “with all the dates we got ahead of us this week. Oh, gee!” Her eyes and eyebrows went up and she clasped her hands dramatically before her. “It’s just terrible, all the dancin’ we gotta do yet, this winter, don’t we, Hortense? Thursday night and Friday night and Saturday and Sunday nights.” She counted on her fingers most archly. “Oh, gee! It is terrible, really.” She gave Clyde an appealing, sympathy-seeking smile. “Guess where we were the other night, Tom. Louise and Ralph Thorpe and Hortense and Bert Gettler, me and Willie Bassick—out at Pegrain’s on Webster Avenue. Oh, an’ you oughta seen the crowd out there. Sam Shaffer and Tillie Burns was there. And we danced until four in the morning. I thought my knees would break. I ain’t been so tired in I don’t know when.”
“Oh, gee!” broke in Hortense, seizing her turn and lifting her arms dramatically. “I thought I never would get to work the next morning. I could just barely see the customers moving around. And, wasn’t my mother fussy! Gee! She hasn’t gotten over it yet. She don’t mind so much about Saturdays and Sundays, but all these week nights and when I have to get up the next morning at seven—gee—how she can pick!”
“An’ I don’t blame her, either,” commented Mrs. Ratterer, who was just then entering with a plate of potatoes and some bread. “You two’ll get sick and Louise, too, if you don’t get more rest. I keep tellin’ her she won’t be able to keep her place or stand it if she don’t get more sleep. But she don’t pay no more attention to me than Tom does, and that’s just none at all.”
“Oh, well, you can’t expect a fellow in my line to get in early always, Ma,” was all Ratterer said. And Hortense Briggs added: “Gee, I’d die if I had to stay in one night. You gotta have a little fun when you work all day.”
What an easy household, thought Clyde. How liberal and indifferent. And the sexy, gay way in which these two girls posed about. And their parents thought nothing of it, evidently. If only he could have a girl as pretty as this Hortense Briggs, with her small, sensuous mouth and her bright hard eyes.
“To bed twice a week early is all I need,” announced Greta Miller archly. “My father thinks I’m crazy, but more’n that would do me harm.” She laughed jestingly, and Clyde, in spite of the “we was’es” and “I seen’s,” was most vividly impressed. Here was youth and geniality and freedom and love of life.
And just then the front door opened and in hurried Louise Ratterer, a medium-sized, trim, vigorous little girl in a red-lined cape and a soft blue felt hat pulled over her eyes. Unlike her brother, she was brisk and vigorous and more lithe and as pretty as either of these others.
“Oh, look who’s here!” she exclaimed. “You two birds beat me home, didnja? Well, I got stuck tonight on account of some mix-up in my sales-book. And I had to go up to the cashier’s office. You bet it wasn’t my fault, though. They got my writin’ wrong,” then noting Clyde for the first time, she announced: “I bet I know who this is—Mr. Griffiths. Tom’s talked about you a lot. I wondered why he didn’t bring you around here before.” And Clyde, very much flattered, mumbled that he wished he had.
But the two visitors, after conferring with Louise in a small front bedroom to which they all retired, reappeared presently and because of strenuous invitations, which were really not needed, decided to remain. And Clyde, because of their presence, was now intensely wrought up and alert—eager to make a pleasing impression and to be received upon terms of friendship here. And these three girls, finding him attractive, were anxious to be agreeable to him, so much so that for the first time in his life they put him at his ease with the opposite sex and caused him to find
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