This youth, aside from a certain emotionalism and exotic sense of romance which characterized him, and which he took more from his father than from his mother. The history of this man and his wife is of no particular interest here save as it affected their boy of twelve, Clyde Griffiths. On the other hand, as has been indicated, his wife was of a firmer texture but with scarcely any truer or more practical insight into anything. Indeed it would be hard to make clear just how life appealed to him, or what the true hue of his emotional responses was. His writing often portrays characters whose strength lies not in their moral code or ethics, but instead in their absolute persistence as they are confronted by all obstacles their unwillingness to yield. To begin with, Asa Griffiths, the father, was one of those poorly integrated and correlated organisms, the product of an environment and a religious theory.īut with no guiding or mental insight of his own, yet sensitive and therefore highly emotional and without any practical sense whatsoever. Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser (1871-1945) was an American novelist and journalist best known for his pioneer work in the naturalist school. Ripped from the headlines, it follows Clyde Griffiths, a handsome, ambitious man whose religious upbringing has left him unprepared to pay the price required to realize the American Dream. Indeed, this one presented one of those anomalies of psychic and social reflex and motivation such as would tax the skill of not only the psychologist but the chemist and physicist as well, to unravel. An American Tragedy is a tour de force, one of the most important novels in the American cannon. THAT such a family, thus cursorily presented, might have a different and somewhat peculiar history could well be anticipated, and it would be true.

An american tragedy novel