SOURCE: "An American Tragedy: A 50th Anniversary: Dreiser's Tragedy: The Distortion of American Values," in Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, 1975, pp. 19-27.

In the following essay, Farrell contends that it is the loss of American values and an uncaring society that represent evil in An American Tragedy.

Dreiser seems to have thought for years about the book that eventually became An American Tragedy. For years he had wanted to write about a crime. He kept clippings of various murder cases, and before the Chester Gillette-Grace Brown case in upstate New York in 1906 he had clippings about other murders, including one about a minister who committed a murder.

An American Tragedy has been compared to Crime and Punishment. But in Crime and Punishment the crime is committed by an intellectual who does a lot of thinking about whether or not he's justified. His was the...