the profits. Mencken refused to reap any personal profit from a private
sale and oªered to return the manuscript to Dreiser.59 He was eventually
allowed to donate it to the New York Public Library, where it is preserved
today.
Just why Dreiser returned to New York is not altogether clear, though he
had indicated to correspondents that his return was imminent. (One of
them was Estelle, who had urged him to return to finish The Bulwark, “then
the ‘American Tragedy.’”) No doubt Helen finally became discouraged by
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 9 5
the younger competition in Hollywood, where her movie career had
amounted to not much more than the status of an extra. When Roberta
Alden in An American Tragedy applies for a job in the Gri‹ths collar fac-
tory, Dreiser describes her as one of “the extras or try-outs.”60 Like her lover,
Clyde, who is driven into her arms out of a sense of not belonging to his
rich uncle’s society, Dreiser had also been an outsider in Hollywood, un-
able to sell any screenplays and having to hear of its doings through He-
len. In his last diary entry before returning to New York that fall he laments
a rejection by Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan. Now he was spending a
good part of his time either gardening or watering his lawn in the great
California desert. “Personally feel very much depressed and soon go to bed.
At the moment see no very clear way out of money troubles or that I am
making any real artistic headway with work. The relentless push against
the individual on and away into dissolution hangs heavy on me.” In 1922
Shadowland magazine, which had published his four-part series of Holly-
wood articles, ranked Dreiser fourteenth out of “America’s Top Favored
Forty” writers, well behind fellow Hoosier Booth Tarkington and Edith
Wharton, who occupied first and second place. Edgar Lee Masters ranked
eighth, five places in front of Robert Frost. Sinclair Lewis was tenth.
Mencken was twenty-fourth on this dubious list.61
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 9 6
t h i r t e e n
An American Tragedy
–
I feel it an honor to be permitted to even
tell such a tale & on that basis I am working on.
D R E I S E R T O H E L E N R I C H A R D S O N , J U N E 1 8 , 1 9 2 4
in the summer of 1906, Grace (“Billy”) Brown drowned on Big Moose
Lake in Herkimer County, New York. Less than two years later Chester E.
Gillette was electrocuted for her murder in Auburn Prison, following a sen-
sational trial that was graphically reported in the New York World and else-
where. This was the basis for the story of Clyde Gri‹ths and Roberta Alden
that Dreiser, the failed screenwriter, brought back from Hollywood, the tale
he would struggle with, sometimes desperately, for the next three years, try-
ing to breathe life and meaning back into these grim facts of death. Dreiser
later claimed that this particular case hadn’t influenced him until after he
returned from California, but this statement is clearly contradicted by oth-
ers. In 1926, for example, he told Thomas P. Beyer of Hamline University
in St. Paul that he “had thought and brooded upon the Chester Gillette
murder case for many years” before ever setting pen to paper. A year later
he told another enthusiast that he “had long brooded” on the case and his
purpose in writing the novel had been “to give, if possible, a background
and a psychology of reality which would somehow explain, if not condone,
how such murders could happen.” Moreover, we already know that he had
investigated a street mission before leaving Los Angeles. Chester Gillette
had not only the same initials as Clyde Gri‹ths, but also parents who were
street preachers. Indeed, the facts of the case and the novel are so parallel
that a few critics have tended to discount An American Tragedy as art.1
2 9 7
Like Clyde, Chester Gillette had lived in various cities in the West, where
his parents worked for the Salvation Army. Chester’s family wasn’t as poor
as Dreiser makes the Gri‹thses, but after Frank Gillette gave up his engi-
neer’s job in 1892—when his son was ten—to follow his religious calling,
the family income was significantly reduced. The boy attended Oberlin, as
has also been pointed out in source studies for the novel, but it was the
preparatory school, not the college, and the tuition was paid by a distant
relative. Unlike Clyde, who can hardly keep up with his rich cousins’ so-
cial set when the conversation turns to colleges, Chester never disabused
his friends of the fiction that he had studied at the college level. His uncle,
Noah H. Gillette, the owner of a skirt factory in Cortland, New York, first
gave Chester a job in his plant in the summer of 1901 while he was still a
student at Oberlin. Afterward, Chester dropped out of school because of
failing grades, drifted around the country, and became a brakeman for the
Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad. In 1905 he went to work full-
time for his uncle.2
Clyde, who also comes east from Kansas City and Chicago to seek his
fortune, is given similar duties in his uncle’s collar factory in Lycurgus, where
he becomes involved with Roberta (“Bert”) Alden, one of several factory
hands under his supervision. There he is warned by his look-alike cousin
Gilbert not to socialize with the female employees, while also not imme-
diately invited to join his uncle’s social class. There were no such caveats is-
sued to Chester, who was free to flirt openly with the factory girls, includ-
ing Grace Brown, while also moving in the higher social circles of his uncle.
He led a double life in Cortland: the ex-brakeman was rough enough for
one set, while the ex–prep school student was polished enough for the other.
The only warning he received, also from a cousin who supervised his work,
was that socializing with fellow employees (Chester wasn’t an overseer of
Grace Brown the way Clyde is placed over Roberta Alden) might decrease
their e‹ciency as factory workers. This diªerence is probably important in
appreciating how Dreiser turned fact into fiction. For just as he may have
exaggerated in Newspaper Days the chasm between the rich and poor, he
raises these barriers at least a little higher in An American Tragedy than they
actually were in supposedly democratic America. Leaning more and more
toward the socialist idea in the 1920s, Dreiser sought to see Clyde as a vic-
tim of social and economic forces beyond his control. To do so, he induces
an Aladdin-like dream in which the vain and beautiful Sondra Finchley falls
in love with Clyde and sweeps him up to her social level briefly, whereas in
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
2 9 8
Chester’s case the young man never fully succeeded in securing the atten-
tions of any one particular female among Cortland’s leisure class.
Although he was moving up socially, Chester was still only on the pe-
riphery of the circle that included such privileged young ladies as Harriet
Benedict and Josephine Patrick when he got “Billy” Brown in trouble. By
the summer of 1905 he and Grace had become a “couple”—seen together
mainly at the factory during lunch breaks. Chester also visited her regu-
larly, first in her sister’s parlor and later in a room Grace rented by herself
(paralleled by Roberta’s move away from Grace Marr in a home with so-
cial supervision to a rented room with a private entrance), but he seldom
took her out in public. She wasn’t, however, the simple farmer’s daughter
the newspapers made her out to be, but someone who sought to better her-
self through reading (to become Chester’s “equal”); once she became preg-
nant, though, she fell apart. She subsequently wrote Chester a series of
pathetic—indeed, masochistic—letters, some of which were used nearly
verbatim by Dreiser in his novel. By May, fearing that her pregnancy was
beginning to show, she quit her factory job and returned to her parents’
home just outside South Otselic (“Biltz” in the novel).
From her parents’ shabby farmhouse, she pleaded with Chester to come
to her, apparently under the impression that he had indicated a willingness
to marry. But Chester continued to socialize in Cortland as before. When
this news got back to her through friends, Grace became angry and jealous
and threatened to expose him to the community and no doubt to his un-
cle. Like Clyde, he delayed action as long as he could, but there is little or
no evidence that the couple considered abortion as they do in the novel.