As we have been reminded by numerous literary and non-literary outlets this year, 2025 marks the hundredth-year anniversary of the publication of Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby. We are continually told how its characters and themes have penetrated the American unconscious like few other canonical works have. A.O. Scott, in a New York Times article published earlier this year, puts it this way: “What we think about Gatsby illuminates what we think about money, race, romance and history. How we imagine him has a lot to do with how we see ourselves.” Fitzgerald’s novel is politically relevant as well, illuminating Donald Trump’s America, and bearing an uncanny example of Oscar Wilde’s notion of “life imitating art” when the president hosted his Great-Gatsby-themed Halloween party. Trump may appear as if he comes out of the book itself. Alexander Howard, in a short piece for The Conversation, elaborates how Trump is “a weird combination of characters,” some kind of composite of Gatsby, the irresponsible social climber, and Tom Buchanan, the spoiled, sheltered, and most of all racist elitist.
Succinctly, The Great Gatsby has become the representative novel about the American Dream. As we approach New Year’s, however, a different American literary anniversary deserves acknowledgement. A second 1925 classic of American literature has received virtually no recognition: Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, a plodding, unpoetic, naturalist, far-less-read epic based on Chester Gillette’s newsworthy murder of Grace Brown in 1906. Dreiser’s novel, like Fitzgerald’s, accentuates the complexity and ultimate futility of pursuing the American Dream. But it does so in its own way and I urge anyone interested in the mythos of America and its particular cast of aspirational characters to read Dreiser’s work, preferably after a deep reading of Gatsby.
Both novelists focused on a young man seeking a more prosperous life while doing whatever he can to achieve it. Clyde Griffiths, the protagonist of Dreiser’s novel, like James Gatz (before he was Gatsby that is), abandons his modest and deeply religious upbringing in order to reinvent himself in a style that has become the hallmark of American stories of self-willed aspiration and renewal. Dreiser offers a lengthy account of Clyde’s unfulfilling life with his street-preaching family, a notable distinction from Gatsby, which merely provides flashbacks of the protagonist’s roots in North Dakota. It does not take too much imagination, however, to fit the two characters into the same milieu of American self-starters whose unrealistic dreaming is their final undoing.
Like Gatsby’s tale, which the narrator Nick Carraway ultimately concludes “has been a story of the West, after all,” An American Tragedy chronicles the awkward and destructive troubles of a Midwesterner trying to make it out East and realizing that he doesn’t quite fit in. Clyde, a bellhop at a fancy hotel in Kansas City, winds up fleeing Missouri as an accessory to a hit-and-run that results in the death of a little girl. Now working at the Union League Club in Chicago, Clyde runs into his rich uncle from upstate New York whom he had heard about from his father and had dreams of someday meeting. Samuel Griffiths (the uncle), who had always pitied his brother’s meagerness, decides to bring Clyde to his hometown of Lycurgus, New York, and introduces him to the shirt-collar factory that he oversees. There, Clyde lands a small supervisory role and subsequently develops feelings for one of his female underlings, Roberta Alden.
Violating the rule at the factory prohibiting romantic relationships between employees, Clyde and Roberta nurture a clandestine romance. Things, however, end up taking a turn for the worse when Clyde impregnates Roberta at the same time that he falls for the affluent and beautiful Sondra Finchley, very much the Daisy Buchanan of Dreiser’s novel. Failing to provide her with a successful abortion, Clyde, inspired by a drowning he read about in a local newspaper, takes Roberta on a trip to a lake outside of Lycurgus with the intention of “accidentally” upsetting the boat and leaving her to drown, knowing that she is unable to swim. Senselessly and cruelly, he figures the only way to be rid of her is to kill her, believing that he deserves better and should not have to marry her out of sheer goodwill.
Once on the lake, Clyde is apprehensive and is nearly ready to forsake his original plan. And yet, in a moment of impulsive rage, he strikes her with enough force for her to fall into the water while turning the boat over with her. Although these events are halfway accidental—when he strikes her he isn’t technically aiming to upset the boat—his abandonment of her is not, as it would’ve been easy enough for him to swim over to her and save her from drowning. Clyde vacates the scene but is soon caught by the authorities. The rest of novel follows the trial and ultimate conviction of Clyde, who is finally sentenced to death by electrocution.
At one point during the trial, Clyde’s attorneys, who attempt to prove his innocence on account of his “mental and moral cowardice,” suggest that Clyde’s failure to do the right thing—that is, marry her or at the very least rescue her—is a product of his “perhaps too pliable and sensual and impractical and dreaming mind.” That “dreaming mind” began to take on a life of its own since his time in Kansas City, but it is after his first few encounters with Sondra Finchley that he starts to dream with a dangerous sense of entitlement. Consider this revealing passage:
For ever since that second contact with her [Sondra], he had been more definitely fascinated than at any time before by the dream that somehow, in some way, he was to be lifted from the lowly state in which he now dwelt. He was, as he now saw it, really too good for the commonplace world by which he was environed.
It can be said that Gatsby, too, is fatefully carried away by a “dreaming mind.” Towards the end of the novel, Nick speculates beautifully,
No telephone message arrived, but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock—until long after there was anyone to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
Although neither Clyde nor Gatsby manage to live for very long, they do both live “too long with a single dream,” a dream that sows a fatal conclusion. Irving Howe, in the 1964 essay “Dreiser and Tragedy: The Stature of Theodore Dreiser,” contends that An American Tragedy is a “parable of our national experience” and, more specifically, a book chiefly concerned with “American desire.” The Great Gatsby is also that—a parable of our national experience and our most popular record of the catastrophic effects of “American desire.”
And yet, there’s that other aspect of Dreiser’s novel—notably, the innocent youth turned violent by unfavorable circumstances—that connects it with classics of the American arts such as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, not to mention George Stevens’s 1951 classic A Place in the Sun, directly based on Dreiser’s novel. Clyde is and isn’t Gatsby. Their fates are different, as are their positions in society. In general, there are no great characters in Dreiser. There may or may not be any in The Great Gatsby either, but it is up to us as readers to interpret the title ironically or not. I’d like to think that there’s a smidge of candor on Fitzgerald’s part in referring to Gatsby as “great.” As for Clyde Griffiths, Howe argues he that he “represents not our potential greatness but our collective smallness, the common denominator of our foolish tastes and tawdry ambitions.”
If there is a Clyde in Gatsby, it’s as a synthesis of Gatsby and George B. Wilson, the husband of Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan’s mistress, and the man who shoots Gatsby at end of the novel. George is precisely the sort of “small” character that Dreiser centralizes in An American Tragedy—the undervalued and unremarkable individual who fulfills an act of substantial consequence. It is in this way as well that we can see just how peripheral violence is to Gatsby, even if the central event of the novel—the car crash—is strikingly violent. The whole of Dreiser is violent, not just Clyde’s murderous act, whereas Fitzgerald assembles a setting punctuated by turbulent outbursts that can feel out of place.
Noting the inherent violence of the various worlds Dreiser concocts, progressive writer Randolph Bourne, in “The Art of Theodore Dreiser,” resolves, “Dreiser loves, too, the ugly violent bursts of American industry,—the flaming steel-mills and gaunt lakesides.” This brings me to my final comparative point, which is that An American Tragedy puts into focus the palpable absence of institutions and industries in The Great Gatsby. Alternatively, Dreiser concentrates on the institutional and industrial limits of American self-definition. Howe, appreciating Dreiser’s literary innovation, declares:
No other novelist has absorbed into his work as much knowledge as Dreiser had about American institutions: the mechanisms of business, the stifling rhythms of the factory, the inner hierarchy of a large hotel, the chicaneries of city politics, the status arrangements of rulers and ruled. For the most part Dreiser’s characters are defined through their relationships to these institutions. They writhe and suffer to win a foothold in the slippery social world or to break out of the limits of established social norms.
We have to invent the limits, mostly existential, that exist in Gatsby; in An American Tragedy, those limits are materially overwhelming. At his least dreaming, Clyde himself acknowledges the limiting presence of the shirt-collar factory. “I’ve been trying to talk to you ever since you came to work at the factory,” he articulates to Roberta early on in their relationship, “but you see how very watchful every one is. They’re the limit.”
1925 saw the publication of other important works of American literature, including Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans,Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Hemingway’s first collection of short stories In Our Time, Sinclair Lewis’s medical novel Arrowsmith, and Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer. In poetry, T. S. Eliot published “The Hallow Men” while Ezra Pound put into print Cantos I-XVI. But it is An American Tragedy that remains the peculiar twin of The Great Gatsby, andthe book that, although overshadowed by Fitzgerald’s finer aesthetic achievements, is arguably more relevant today. In another article celebrating the hundred years of Gatsby, Maureen Corrigan of NPR writes, “[g]reat works of art are great, in part, because they continue to have something to say to the present: They’re both timebound and timeless. And, boy, does Gatsby have something to say to us in 2025.” With this in mind, Dreiser’s epic qualifies as a great work of art. I’d say, in more than one way, it speaks directly to our national situation in 2025.
