1925Naturalism
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser · 1871–1945 · United States
Why it matters
A poor young man's desperate social climbing leads to a lake, a drowning that may or may not have been murder, and a trial staged as much around ambition and class as around evidence. Dreiser's massive, exhaustive indictment of the American dream's underside.
At a glance
psychological noveltragedy
Difficulty 5/10slow pace859 pagesDreiser's flat, exhaustive prose demands stamina more than close reading.
Deep dive
Dreiser spends nearly eight hundred pages asking how much of one man's crime was ever really his own doing, and how much was manufactured by the class system he was so desperate to climb into.
