An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) ๐
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Clyde Griffithโs parents are poor street-preachers, but Clyde doesnโt โbelieve,โ 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 uncleโs family, and starved for companionship, he breaks the factoryโs 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 uncleโs 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 โwrong element,โ 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
Read book online ยซAn American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (i can read book club .TXT) ๐ยป. Author - Theodore Dreiser
If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall move; and nothing shall be impossible to you. Matthew 17:20.
For the day of the Lord is near. Obadiah 15.
For there shall be no reward to the evil man. Proverbs 24:20.
Look, then, not upon the wine when it is red: it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. Proverbs 23:31,32.
These mighty adjurations were as silver and gold plates set in a wall of dross.
The rear forty feet of this very commonplace floor was intricately and yet neatly divided into three small bedrooms, a living room which overlooked the backyard and wooden fences of yards no better than those at the back; also, a combination kitchen and dining room exactly ten feet square, and a store room for mission tracts, hymnals, boxes, trunks and whatever else of non-immediate use, but of assumed value, which the family owned. This particular small room lay immediately to the rear of the mission hall itself, and into it before or after speaking or at such times as a conference seemed important, both Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths were wont to retireโ โalso at times to meditate or pray.
How often had Clyde and his sisters and younger brother seen his mother or father, or both, in conference with some derelict or semi-repentant soul who had come for advice or aid, most usually for aid. And here at times, when his motherโs and fatherโs financial difficulties were greatest, they were to be found thinking, or as Asa Griffiths was wont helplessly to say at times, โpraying their way out,โ a rather ineffectual way, as Clyde began to think later.
And the whole neighborhood was so dreary and rundown that he hated the thought of living in it, let alone being part of a work that required constant appeals for aid, as well as constant prayer and thanksgiving to sustain it.
Mrs. Elvira Griffiths before she had married Asa had been nothing but an ignorant farm girl, brought up without much thought of religion of any kind. But having fallen in love with him, she had become inoculated with the virus of Evangelism and proselytizing which dominated him, and had followed him gladly and enthusiastically in all of his ventures and through all of his vagaries. Being rather flattered by the knowledge that she could speak and sing, her ability to sway and persuade and control people with the โword of God,โ as she saw it, she had become more or less pleased with herself on this account and so persuaded to continue.
Occasionally a small band of people followed the preachers to their mission, or learning of its existence through their street work, appeared there laterโ โthose odd and mentally disturbed or distrait souls who are to be found in every place. And it had been Clydeโs compulsory duty throughout the years when he could not act for himself to be in attendance at these various meetings. And always he had been more irritated than favorably influenced by the types of men and women who came hereโ โmostly menโ โdown-and-out laborers, loafers, drunkards, wastrels, the botched and helpless who seemed to drift in, because they had no other place to go. And they were always testifying as to how God or Christ or Divine Grace had rescued them from this or that predicamentโ โnever how they had rescued anyone else. And always his father and mother were saying โAmenโ and โGlory to God,โ and singing hymns and afterward taking up a collection for the legitimate expenses of the hallโ โcollections which, as he surmised, were little enoughโ โbarely enough to keep the various missions they had conducted in existence.
The one thing that really interested him in connection with his parents was the existence somewhere in the eastโ โin a small city called Lycurgus, near Utica he understoodโ โof an uncle, a brother of his fatherโs, who was plainly different from all this. That uncleโ โSamuel Griffiths by nameโ โwas rich. In one way and another, from casual remarks dropped by his parents, Clyde had heard references to certain things this particular uncle might do for a person, if he but would; references to the fact that he was a shrewd, hard business man; that he had a great house and a large factory in Lycurgus for the manufacture of collars and shirts, which employed not less than three hundred people; that he had a son who must be about Clydeโs age, and several daughters, two at least, all of whom must be, as Clyde imagined, living in luxury in Lycurgus. News of all this had apparently been brought west in some way by people who knew Asa and his father and brother. As Clyde pictured this uncle, he must be a kind of Croesus, living in ease and luxury there in the east, while here in the westโ โKansas Cityโ โhe and his parents and his brother and sisters were living in the same wretched and humdrum, hand-to-mouth state that had always characterized their lives.
But for thisโ โapart from anything he might do for himself, as he early began to seeโ โthere was no remedy. For at fifteen, and even a little earlier, Clyde began to understand that his education, as well as his sistersโ and brotherโs, had been sadly neglected. And it would be rather hard for him to overcome this handicap, seeing that other boys and girls with more money and better homes were being trained for special kinds of work. How was one to get a start under such circumstances? Already when, at the age of thirteen, fourteen and fifteen, he began looking in the papers, which, being too worldly, had never been admitted to his home, he found that mostly skilled help was wanted, or boys to learn trades in which at the moment he was not very much interested. For true to the standard of the American youth, or the general American attitude toward life, he felt himself above the type of labor
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