We understand her fears and concerns when she gets pregnant. We learn why she held out against and then finally gave in to Clyde's advances. We understand by then all the complex aspects of his character and his concerns and fears and desires. This 866 page book goes into rich exploration of just how this man grew up, hit hurdles, overcame them, and got to the point that he was in a factory with a young woman. The book lays out in substantial detail how the process unfolded, even going back to the protagonist, Clyde Griffith's, youngest days. So reading the book was fascinating to me, because at that point I'd learned all about the 1935 real life drowning caused by the book. And then came the movie A Place in the Sun, and on it goes. So we have art imitating real life, and then real life imitating art. Chester Gillette was the man in question and Grace Brown was the woman he drowned. What makes the tale even more fascinating is that An American Tragedy, while fiction, is based on a real life drowning in 1906. There is little doubt that Sherman's actions were based on this book. The writers were referencing this book which had come out exactly ten years before. The trial became a nation-wide sensation and was called "An American Tragedy" by many of the papers. So he took his wife Alice out into the lake in a rowboat and drowned her. Sherman, a married man, had fallen for a young mill-factory co-worker. When talking with friends about my plot, they pointed out that there HAD been a drowning in Lake Singletary, in 1935. I was writing a fictional murder mystery which involved a 1960s drowning in Lake Singletary in Sutton, Massachusetts.
I came into reading An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser in an unusual way.
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