sent to his publisher. Thomas R. Smith, the editor-in-chief at Boni & Liv-
eright, told Dreiser the following spring that he had read the last five or six
chapters of Book II “with real agony. The slow, fatal working-up to the
death of Roberta is one of the grimmest and most gripping tragedies that
I have read in years.” It was so moving, he said, that he had di‹culty in
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 0 8
copyediting it. In fact, Smith, described as “cherubic and acidulous, and a
remarkable drinker,” quarreled with Dreiser several times during the sum-
mer of 1925 over material the editor had wanted excised from the manu-
script.20 Meanwhile, Helen had finally relented and returned to New York
in the late fall, and in January of 1925 the couple took a flat at 1799 Bed-
ford Avenue in Brooklyn for a year. Through the help of Joseph Jay Robin,
the Gatsby-like friend of Twelve Men, Dreiser also rented an o‹ce in which
to work, in the Guardian Life Building near Union Square. Robin, who
had recently acquired a law degree, had an o‹ce in the same building. To-
gether with Arthur Carter Hume, another friend and attorney, he advised
Dreiser on the legal aspects of Book III, which covers the trial and execu-
tion of Clyde Gri‹ths.21
To help himself imagine a death house similar to the one where Clyde
is sent, Dreiser asked Mencken, who had recently accepted Dreiser’s short
story, “Convention,” for the newly established American Mercury, to use
his influence to get him onto death row at nearby Sing Sing. Curiously, he
wanted only to visit the death house, not the actual execution chamber. He
had applied himself to the warden, but had been summarily refused.
Mencken got the World to send Dreiser to Sing Sing as a reporter to cover
the anticipated confession of a convicted murderer, Anthony Pantano, who
had been sent back to the “big co‹n” to die after having been free for a re-
trial. On November 27, 1925, two days after he had allegedly written the
last words of An American Tragedy, Dreiser sat for three hours in a wire cage
and spoke with the chain-smoking murderer, whose three accomplices had
already been executed. There were at the time fifty-two men and women
at Sing Sing waiting to die, and the four wings of the X-shaped death house
may have reminded Dreiser somewhat of the prison that served as the ba-
sis for Cowperwood’s incarceration in Philadelphia. This time, however,
his literary subject was no Nietzschean superman and wasn’t getting out,
and neither were the other inmates, whose bleak situation caused him to
lower his voice to a whisper. He noticed that the guards wore felt-soled shoes,
and the condemned prisoners themselves were also silent. “One opened an
unwinking eye and regarded me stilly,” he later told Dudley Nichols of the
World, “as if he were in another medium beyond communication, like a
fish in an aquarium.”22
Like Clyde’s (and Chester’s) guilt, there was some doubt about Pantano’s—
based at least on the condemned man’s argument that he had been invol-
untarily and forcibly drawn into the deadly crime in which a bank robbery
had turned into murder. Like Clyde at the end, he also subscribed vaguely
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 0 9
to the precepts of organized religion. The visit was like a dream, or a night-
mare, to Dreiser, who said he couldn’t imagine how Pantano ever “got mixed
up in this crime as you are supposed to have been.” In An American Tragedy
while Clyde is on death row, there is the execution of Pasquale Cutrone of
Brooklyn, “an Italian, convicted of the slaying of his brother for attempting
to seduce his wife.” Possibly Dreiser may have amended the details of his
death row scenes slightly after his visit to Sing Sing. The execution of
Cutrone, who doesn’t even speak English, throws Clyde back into the full
misery of his situation, which had been somewhat alleviated by the erudite
and eloquent musings of fellow inmate Miller Nicholson, a lawyer from
Buªalo who —like the murderers in several of the cases Dreiser considered
for his novel—has poisoned his victim.23
We never see the execution chamber in An American Tragedy, only the
door to it as it shuts after the prayerful Italian immigrant passes through.
“There—sure—that’s the end now,” says one guard. “Yes. He knows what’s
on the other side now,” answers another. The execution is the first one to
take place since Clyde’s confinement on death row, and it absolutely terror-
izes him, but Nicholson, who is next, quietly destroys personal papers in his
cell and promises Clyde that he is sending him “something to remember
me by.” He leaves him two books, Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian Nights,
both romances about survival. But unlike Defoe’s protagonist, who finds
a tolerable existence in raw nature, or the boy in “The History of Aladdin,”
who discovers that magic lamp which releases him from his uncle’s prison
and fulfills every desire, Clyde now no longer fantasizes that he can rise above
the limits of his situation. As a bellhop at the Green-Davidson in Kansas
City, he may have found splendor in its garish lobby (the same kind of won-
derland where Hurstwood takes temporary refuge in his American tragedy),
but in Dreiser’s account there is no fantasy left now but religion—belief in
“a literal Heaven and Hell” upheld by Pantano before Dreiser had said his
good-bye. Even here the Rev. Duncan McMillan, the itinerant clergyman
who is overwhelmed by the sordid aspects of Clyde’s confession to him (that
“the unintentional blow [upon Roberta] still had had anger in it”), con-
cludes erroneously that Clyde was guilty both “before God and the law.”24
Yet technically Clyde was no more guilty of purposely striking Roberta than
Hurstwood was in shutting the safe at Fitzgerald and Moy’s. In both cases,
they “didn’t do it.”
What both did do was to participate in circumstances surely leading up
to each climactic and tragic scene. Clyde is driven onward by both chemic
forces and circumstances beyond his control. Since the story was conceived
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 1 0
after Dreiser had read Freud, it is thought to be heavily psychological in
this modern sense. But in the many interior monologues in which Clyde
argues with himself and tries to figure his way out of the chaos surely prom-
ised by Roberta’s condition, we also find traces of that earlier, nineteenth-
century psychologist, Edgar Allan Poe. Like the narrator of Poe’s “The Imp
of the Perverse,” Clyde cannot help himself. This narrator, like Nicholson,
is interestingly enough another poisoner. After Dreiser left Sing Sing that
day, he told Mencken, “My imagination was better—(more true to fact)—
than what I saw.”25 Perhaps, but the more immediate point here is that in
An American Tragedy it was an imagination born in the century of Poe and
honed in the age of Freud.
Shortly before or right after Dreiser’s scheduled visit to Sing Sing, the judge
granting the World permission to send in a reporter became suspicious—
when the reporter turned out to be Dreiser and the judge heard rumors of
his novel-in-progress. This led to a brief quarrel between Dreiser and
Mencken when, to cover its tracks, the World asked Dreiser to write up his
Sing Sing visit in exchange for getting him into the prison—that is, with-
out any payment—and he refused. “World complains that after getting you
permit with great di‹culty by saying you represented it,” wired Mencken,
still piqued because Dreiser had republished The “Genius” without incor-
porating any of Mencken’s eªorts to save it in a more sanitized form, “you
now demand money. This puts me in a nice hole indeed.” Dreiser shot back,
“The World lies. Your telegram is an insult.” A little more calmly the fol-
lowing week, Dreiser—who never forgot his shabby treatment at the World
in 1894—pointed out that it was unfair of the newspaper to expect a five-
thousand-word article free of charge, which it could then syndicate. After
Dreiser agreed to be interviewed by the World for an article on his visit to
Pantano, Mencken quickly agreed that it was all an innocent misunder-
standing and lapsed into his characteristic humor.26
But as we shall see, Mencken did not forget.
–
The plot of An American Tragedy is by now familiar even to those readers
of this biography who have not yet read the novel, or have not read it in
many years, for it follows the Gillette-Brown case almost exactly. Both the
novel and the real-life story feature two post-adolescents from the ranks of
poverty. While they cannot enjoy the freedoms of their crassly rich coun-