SOURCE: "'A Beautiful Legal Problem': Albert Lévitt on An American Tragedy," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 214-42.

In the following essay, Gerber explores the reaction of the legal community to the questions raised in An American Tragedy, particularly the question of whether or not Clyde Griffiths was guilty of first-degree murder.

When in July of 1906 ambitious young Chester Gillette, then of Cortland, New York, invited his pregnant, working-class lover, Grace Brown, on a supposed romantic trip to the isolated waters of Big Moose Lake high in the Adirondacks—intending there to drown her and thereby free himself for a new and more advantageous alliance with the daughter of a local society family—he set in motion a chain of events that has affected American literature ever since. Two decades after the fact there appeared Theodore Dreiser's monumental An American Tragedy, transmuting the...