Američka tragedija

The novel "An American Tragedy" is based on a real-life murder of a young woman named Grace Brown. She was murdered by her lover, a morbidly ambitious young man, because she was an obstacle to his social rise. On the basis of this event, Dreiser built a comprehensive work and gave a broad panorama of American life in the first decades of this century. (The work was first published in 1925). By depicting crime as a consequence of blind inner impulses and social circumstances, Dreiser caused heated discussions and had problems with censorship with this, as with some of his earlier novels (e.g. "Carrie", "Genius"). Like Zola, whom he took as a role model at the beginning of his literary work, Dreiser strives to bring the characters he depicts to the fore as an objective observer, while always remaining in the background himself as a writer. His heroes, always tragic, are portrayed more as victims than as culprits, and Dreiser does not accuse them of the crimes they committed, their immorality and transgressions, but rather the society that shaped them and often forced them to act in such ways. Having emerged in literature as a follower of Zola's naturalism, and then having accepted (in his "Genius", 1915) distinctly Nietzschean ideas, Dreiser increasingly comes to the realization that the causes of all evil lie primarily in society itself, and he adopts a socialist standpoint, which is already quite pronounced in "An American Tragedy". Although his style is sometimes clumsy (which his opponents always emphasized in order to diminish the artistic value of his works), Dreiser is one of the greatest American writers of the first half of this century, and "An American Tragedy", that novel that radiates a certain gloomy dramatic quality and undeniable tragic power, is among the most valuable works of American literature. Moreover, H. G. Welles, not without reason, always emphasized that it is one of the greatest novels of our century.