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, yes,” returned the younger woman that had played the organ. “At least eleven took tracts. And one old gentleman asked me where the mission was and when we held services.”
“Praise the Lord,” commented the man.
And then at last the mission itself—“The Star of Hope. Bethel Independent Mission, Meetings every Wednesday and Saturday night, 8 to 10. Sundays at 11, 3, 8. Everybody welcome.” And under this legend in each window—“God is Love.” And below that again in smaller type: “How long since you wrote to Mother.”
“Kin’ I have a dime, grandma? I wana’ go up to the corner and git an ice-cream cone.” It was the boy asking.
“Yes, I guess so, Russell. But listen to me. You are to come right back.”
“Yes, I will, grandma, sure. You know me.”
He took the dime that his Grandmother had extracted from a deep pocket in her dress and ran with it to the ice-cream vendor.
Her darling boy. The light and color of her declining years. She must be kind to him, more liberal with him, not restrain him too much, as maybe, maybe, she had—She looked affectionately and yet a little vacantly after him as he ran. “For his sake.”
The small company, minus Russell, entered the yellow, unprepossessing door and disappeared.
ColophonAn American Tragedy
was published in 1925 by
Theodore Dreiser.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Vince Rice,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2015 by
Project Gutenberg Australia
and on digital scans available at the
HathiTrust Digital Library.
The cover page is adapted from
Lake George, Free Study,
a painting completed in 1872 by
John Frederick Kensett.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
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