SOURCE: "Dreiser's An American Tragedy," in Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, edited by M. L. Friedland, University of Toronto Press, 1991, pp. 170-86.

In the following essay, Hayne examines the ways in which An American Tragedy is a "peculiarly American" tragedy.

Theodore Dreiser is the first major American novelist of 'ethnic' background and name (following on the Browns, the Hawthornes, the Jameses, the Clemenses), a member of a deprived minority looking in on a world not hitherto his own. In An American Tragedy (1925), his masterpiece, he wrote a novel which was strongly doctrinaire, showing its hero as the victim of that world not his own. He wrote a novel which drew heavily on the contemporary people's (and immigrants') art of the cinema, and then gave that novel, rather less than willingly, back to the cinema. And he wrote a novel which was based in a real crime...