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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But worse yet, if anything, Mrs. Griffiths, because of what the Reverend McMillan had said—or failed to say, in answer to the final question asked by Governor Waltham—and although subsequently in answer to an inquiry of her own, he had repeated the statement, she was staggered by the thought that perhaps, after all, Clyde was as guilty as at first she had feared. And because of that asking at one point:
“Clyde, if there is anything you have not confessed, you must confess it before you go.”
“I have confessed everything to God and to Mr. McMillan, Mother. Isn’t that enough?”
“No, Clyde. You have told the world that you are innocent. But if you are not you must say so.”
“But if my conscience tells me that I am right, is not that enough?”
“No, not if God’s word says differently, Clyde,” replied Mrs. Griffiths nervously—and with great inward spiritual torture. But he chose to say nothing further at that time. How could he discuss with his mother or the world the strange shadings which in his confession and subsequent talks with the Reverend McMillan he had not been able to solve. It was not to be done.
And because of that refusal on her son’s part to confide in her, Mrs. Griffiths, tortured, not only spiritually but personally. Her own son—and so near death and not willing to say what already apparently he had said to Mr. McMillan. Would not God ever be done with this testing her? And yet on account of what McMillan had already said—that he considered Clyde, whatever his past sins, contrite and clean before the Lord—a youth truly ready to meet his Maker—she was prone to rest. The Lord was great! He was merciful. In His bosom was peace. What was death—what life—to one whose heart and mind were at peace with Him? It was nothing. A few years (how very few) and she and Asa and after them, his brothers and sisters, would come to join him—and all his miseries here would be forgotten. But without peace in the Lord—the full and beautiful realization of His presence, love, care and mercy … ! She was tremulous at moments now in her spiritual exaltation—no longer quite normal—as Clyde could see and feel. But also by her prayers and anxiety as to his spiritual welfare, he was also able to see how little, really, she had ever understood of his true moods and aspirations. He had longed for so much there in Kansas City and he had had so little. Things—just things—had seemed very important to him—and he had so resented being taken out on the street as he had been, before all the other boys and girls, many of whom had all the things that he so craved, and when he would have been glad to have been anywhere else in the world than out there—on the street! That mission life that to his mother was so wonderful, yet, to him, so dreary! But was it wrong for him to feel so? Had it been? Would the Lord resent it now? And, maybe, she was right as to her thoughts about him. Unquestionably he would have been better off if he had followed her advice. But how strange it was, that to his own mother, and even now in these closing hours, when above all things he craved sympathy—but more than sympathy, true and deep understanding—even now—and as much as she loved and sympathized with, and was seeking to aid him with all her strength in her stern and self-sacrificing way—still he could not turn to her now and tell her, his own mother, just how it all happened. It was as though there was an unsurmountable wall or impenetrable barrier between them, built by the lack of understanding—for it was just that. She would never understand his craving for ease and luxury, for beauty, for love—his particular kind of love that went with show, pleasure, wealth, position, his eager and immutable aspirations and desires. She could not understand these things. She would look on all of it as sin—evil, selfishness. And in connection with all the fatal steps involving Roberta and
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