Roberta Alden

An American Tragedy

Dust jacket of early edition of An American Tragedy, published by Boni & Liveright, 1926
Author	Theodore Dreiser
Country	US
Language	English
Genre	Crime fiction
Publisher	Boni & Liveright
Publication date	December 17, 1925
Dewey Decimal	813.52

An American Tragedy (1925) is a novel by the American writer Theodore Dreiser.

Ambitious, but ill-educated, naïve, and immature, Clyde Griffiths is raised by poor and devoutly religious parents to help in their street missionary work. As a young adult, Clyde must, to help support his family, take menial jobs as a soda jerk, then a bellhop at a prestigious Kansas City hotel. There, his more sophisticated colleagues introduce him to bouts of social drinking and sex with some of the hotel's female guests and with prostitutes.

Enjoying his new lifestyle, Clyde becomes infatuated with Hortense Briggs, who persuades Clyde to buy her an expensive jacket. When Clyde learns Hortense desires his colleague Sparser, not him, as a lover, he becomes jealous. Hortense repeatedly tells Clyde that she loves him, while getting him to buy her the jacket (for which they are overcharged by a stereotypically greedy Jewish shopkeeper).

Clyde's life changes dramatically when Sparser, driving Clyde, Hortense, and other friends back from a secluded rendezvous in the country in a stolen car, hits a little girl and kills her. Fleeing from the police at high speed, Sparser crashes the car. Everyone but Sparser and his partner flee the scene of the crime. Clyde leaves Kansas City, fearing prosecution as an accessory to Sparser's crimes. This pattern of personal irresponsibility and panicked decision-making in Clyde's life recurs in the story, culminating in the central tragedy of the novel.

While working as a bellboy at an exclusive club in Chicago, he meets his wealthy uncle Samuel Griffiths, the owner of a shirt-collar factory in the fictional city of Lycurgus, New York. Samuel, feeling guilt for neglecting his poor relations, offers to help Clyde if he will come to Lycurgus. When Clyde accepts the offer, his uncle gives Clyde a menial job at the factory, in which Clyde makes a very good showing. After that, Samuel Griffiths gives his nephew Clyde a minor supervisory job at the collar factory's offices.

Samuel Griffiths' son Gilbert, Clyde's immediate supervisor, makes it clear to Clyde that as a Griffiths, he should not consort with the working people of Lycurgus, and specifically not with the women under his supervision. As Clyde has no close friends in Lycurgus, he becomes lonely. Emotionally vulnerable, Clyde is drawn to Roberta Alden, a poor and innocent farm girl working in his office, who falls in love with him. Clyde secretly courts Roberta, ultimately persuading her to have sex with him rather than lose him, and makes her pregnant.