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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“So they decided against me. Now I will have to go through that door after all—like all those others. They’ll draw the curtains for me, too. Into that other room—then back across the passage—saying goodbye as I go, like those others. I will not be here any more.” He seemed to be going over each step in his mind—each step with which he was so familiar, only now, for the first time, he was living it for himself. Now, in the face of this dread news, which somehow was as fascinating as it was terrible, feeling not as distrait or weak as at first he had imagined he would be. Rather, to his astonishment, considering all his previous terror in regard to this, thinking of what he would do, what he would say, in an outwardly calm way.
Would he repeat prayers read to him by the Reverend McMillan here? No doubt. And maybe gladly, too. And yet—
In his momentary trance he was unconscious of the fact that the Reverend Duncan was whispering:
“But you see we haven’t reached the end of this yet. There is a new Governor coming into office in January. He is a very sensible and kindly man, I hear. In fact I know several people who know him—and it is my plan to see him personally—as well as to have some other people whom I know write him on the strength of what I will tell them.”
But from Clyde’s look at the moment, as well as what he now said, he could tell that he was not listening.
“My mother. I suppose someone ought to telegraph her. She is going to feel very bad.” And then: “I don’t suppose they believed that those letters shouldn’t have been introduced just as they were, did they? I thought maybe they would.” He was thinking of Nicholson.
“Don’t worry, Clyde,” replied the tortured and saddened McMillan, at this point more eager to take him in his arms and comfort him than to say anything at all. “I have already telegraphed your mother. As for that decision—I will see your lawyers right away. Besides—as I say—I propose to see the Governor myself. He is a new man, you see.”
Once more he was now repeating all that Clyde had not heard before.
XXXIVThe scene was the executive chamber of the newly elected Governor of the State of New York some three weeks after the news conveyed to Clyde by McMillan. After many preliminary and futile efforts on the part of Belknap and Jephson to obtain a commutation of the sentence of Clyde from death to life imprisonment (the customary filing of a plea for clemency, together with such comments as they had to make in regard to the way the evidence had been misinterpreted and the illegality of introducing the letters of Roberta in their original form, to all of which Governor Waltham, an ex-district attorney and judge from the southern part of the state, had been conscientiously compelled to reply that he could see no reason for interfering) there was now before Governor Waltham Mrs. Griffiths together with the Reverend McMillan. For, moved by the widespread interest in the final disposition of Clyde’s case, as well as the fact that his mother, because of her unshaken devotion to him, and having learned of the decision of the Court of Appeals, had once more returned to Auburn and since then had been appealing to the newspapers, as well as to himself through letters for a correct understanding of the extenuating circumstances surrounding her son’s downfall, and because she herself had repeatedly appealed to him for a personal interview in which she should be allowed to present her deepest convictions in regard to all this, the Governor had at last consented to see her. It could do no harm. Besides it would tend to soothe her. Also variable public sentiment, whatever its convictions in any given case, was usually on the side of the form or gesture of clemency—without, however, any violence to its convictions. And, in this case, if one could judge by the newspapers, the public was convinced that Clyde was guilty. On the other hand, Mrs. Griffiths, owing to her own long meditations in regard to Clyde, Roberta, his sufferings during and since the trial, the fact that according to the Reverend McMillan he had at last been won to a deep contrition and a spiritual union with his Creator whatever his original sin, was now more than ever convinced that humanity and even justice demanded that at least he be allowed to live. And so standing before the Governor, a tall, sober and somewhat somber man who, never in all his life had even so much as sensed the fevers or fires that Clyde had known, yet who, being a decidedly affectionate father and husband, could very well sense what Mrs. Griffiths’ present emotions must be. Yet greatly exercised by the compulsion which the facts, as he understood them, as well as a deep-seated and unchangeable submission to law and order, thrust upon him. Like the pardon clerk before him, he had read all the evidence submitted to the Court of Appeals, as well as the latest briefs submitted
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