The autobiography is one of the first depictions of the american dream

Modern War

In the mid-1960s, a generation raised in unprecedented prosperity and still searching for its own identity found itself embroiled in the Vietnam War. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is often cited as a literary response to events in Vietnam, though Vonnegut was writing of his personal experiences surrounding the Allied bombing of Dresden during World War II. The central gimmick of the novel is that main character Billy Pilgrim has become "unstuck" in time and experiences scattered moments from throughout his life in no particular chronological order. This allows Vonnegut to tell his semi-autobiographical story obliquely, to convey the full experience of war without using a traditional story structure; as Pilgrim notes, "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." Similarly, Tim O'Brien based the stories contained in his collection The Things They Carried (1990) on his own experiences in Vietnam, but he was careful to select story "truth" over fact to make his points. As O'Brien himself puts it, "You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened … and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain." Both authors drive home the message that war has no winners; even those who survive carry the burden of their experiences with them until they die. Though the two works were published more than twenty years apart, Slaughterhouse-Five and The Things They Carried both illustrate an important shift in how Americans viewed war in the decades following World War II.
CHAPTER 2. "AMERICAN DREAM" IN "AMERICAN TRAGEDY" by T. DREISER
2.1 The American dream in the works of T. Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser painted a broad realistic picture of American reality in his novels. Dreiser's work is rich and varied. One of the main topics in his novels was the theme of the "American dream", its ups and downs, the collision of dreams and reality, the transformation of the "American dream" into an "American tragedy".

Dreiser is characterized by a new approach to the "American dream". Instead of her praises, grandiloquent and moralizing arguments in the spirit of Horatio Alger, Dreiser included the “dream” in the context of real American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and showed her not fictional, but real fate. Assessing the role of Dreiser in the development of American literature, the English literary critic Walter Allen wrote: "The appearance of Dreiser with his skeptical view of the "American dream" made a real revolution."
In his Trilogy of Desire, Dreiser realistically depicts the development of capitalism in America in the second half of the last century. The hero of the trilogy novels The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914) Frank Algernon Cowperwood professes the religion of success. Ignoring any principles of morality, bringing misfortune to his loved ones, he slowly but inevitably climbs the ladder of success in life: from a petty stock speculator he becomes a powerful financial tycoon. Even when Cowperwood goes to jail for speculating in city shares, he does not lose his faith in himself, in his success. In the end, he becomes the owner of a tram transport in Chicago, a monstrously rich and all-powerful magnate.
Although Cowperwood never considers morality in his actions, he cannot be called a soulless, devoid of intelligence person. He has his own philosophy, which is expressed in the motto: "My desires come first." According to Dreiser, he is the "prince of dreams", but even this strong, enterprising person, the philosophy of success eventually leads to a moral and life catastrophe. Success turns out to be an illusion.
Despite the difference in the mental appearance of the characters. An American Tragedy continues the same theme as the Trilogy of Desire. Noting this circumstance, the prominent writer Robert Peni Warren writes: “Cowperwood is the 'prince of the dream', Clyde is the slave of the dream. Neither one nor the other has a consciousness of his own "I", but Cowperwood vigorously maintains his illusions, Clyde passively follows them. Both represent the two poles of the "tragedy" of America, the country of fictitious values that are generated by fictitious self-consciousness.
In his novels, Dreiser showed the tragedy of the "American dream", the impossibility of its implementation by moral means. Against the backdrop of literature that preaches pragmatic values, the philosophy of success, and militant individualism, Dreiser was the first to question the possibility of realizing those social and moral ideals of success and prosperity that make up the content of the bourgeois "American dream".
An American Tragedy is a 1925 novel by American writer Theodore Dreiser. He began the manuscript in the summer of 1920, but a year later abandoned most of that text. It was based on the notorious murder of Grace Brown in 1906 and the trial of her lover. In 1923 Dreiser returned to the project, and with the help of his wife Helen and two editor-secretaries, Louise Campbell and Sally Kusell, he completed the massive novel in 1925. The book entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2021. Clyde Griffiths is raised by poor and devoutly religious parents to help in their street missionary work. As a young man, Clyde must, to help support his family, take menial jobs as a soda jerk, then a bellhop at a prestigious Kansas City hotel. There, his more sophisticated colleagues introduce him to bouts of social drinking and sex with prostitutes.
Enjoying his new lifestyle, Clyde becomes infatuated with manipulative Hortense Briggs, who manipulates him into buying her expensive gifts. When Clyde learns Hortense goes out with other men, he becomes jealous. Nevertheless, he would rather spend money on her than to help his sister, who had eloped, only to end up pregnant and abandoned by her lover.
Clyde's life changes dramatically when his friend Sparser, driving Clyde, Hortense, and other friends back from a secluded rendezvous in the country in his boss's car, used without permission, hits a little girl and kills her. Fleeing from the police at high speed, Sparser crashes the car. Everyone but Sparser and his partner flee the scene of the crime. Clyde leaves Kansas City, fearing prosecution as an accessory to Sparser's crimes.
While working as a bellboy at an exclusive club in Chicago, he meets his wealthy uncle Samuel Griffiths, the owner of a shirt-collar factory in the fictional city of Lycurgus, New York. Samuel, feeling guilt for neglecting his poor relations, offers Clyde a menial job at the factory. After that, he promotes Clyde to a minor supervisory role.
Samuel Griffiths's son Gilbert, Clyde's immediate supervisor, warns Clyde that as a manager, he should not consort with women working under his supervision. At the same time the Griffithses pay Clyde little attention socially. As Clyde has no close friends in Lycurgus, he becomes lonely. Emotionally vulnerable, Clyde is drawn to Roberta Alden, a poor and innocent farm girl working in his shop, who falls in love with him. Clyde secretly courts Roberta, ultimately getting her pregnant.
At the same time, elegant young socialite Sondra Finchley, daughter of another Lycurgus factory owner, takes an interest in Clyde despite his cousin Gilbert's efforts to keep them apart. Clyde's engaging manner makes him popular among the young smart set of Lycurgus; he and Sondra become close, and he courts her while neglecting Roberta. Roberta expects Clyde to marry her to avert the shame of an unwed pregnancy, but Clyde now dreams instead of marrying Sondra.
Having failed to procure an abortion for Roberta, Clyde gives her no more than desultory help with living expenses while his relationship with Sondra matures. When Roberta threatens to reveal her relationship with Clyde unless he marries her, he plans to murder her by drowning while they go boating. He had read a local newspaper report of a boating accident.
Clyde takes Roberta out in a canoe on the fictional Big Bittern Lake (modeled on Big Moose Lake, New York) in the Adirondacks, and rows to a secluded bay. He freezes. Sensing something wrong, Roberta moves toward him, and he unintentionally strikes her in the face with a camera, stunning her and accidentally capsizing the boat. Roberta, unable to swim, drowns, while Clyde, unwilling to save her, swims to shore. The narrative implies that the blow was accidental, but the trail of circumstantial evidence left by the panicky and guilt-ridden Clyde points to murder.
The local authorities are eager to convict Clyde, to the point of manufacturing additional evidence against him, and he repeatedly incriminates himself with his confused and contradictory testimony. Despite a vigorous (and untruthful) defense by two lawyers hired by his uncle, Clyde is convicted, sentenced to death, and after an appeal is denied, he is executed by electric chair.
Influences and characteristics
Dreiser based the book on a notorious criminal case. On July 11, 1906, resort owners found an overturned boat and the body of Grace Brown at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. Chester Gillette was put on trial, and convicted of killing Brown, though he claimed that her death was a suicide. Gillette was executed by electric chair on March 30, 1908. The murder trial drew international attention when Brown's love letters to Gillette were read in court. Dreiser saved newspaper clippings about the case for several years before writing his novel, during which he studied the case closely. He based Clyde Griffiths on Chester Gillette, deliberately giving him the same initials.
The historical location of most of the central events was Cortland, New York, a city situated in Cortland County in a region replete with place names resonant of Greco-Roman history. Townships include Homer, Solon, Virgil, Marathon, and Cincinnatus. Lycurgus, the pseudonym given to Cortland, was the legendary law-giver of ancient Sparta. Grace Brown, a farm girl from the small town of South Otselic in adjacent Chenango County, was the factory girl who was Gillette's lover. The place where Grace was killed, Big Moose Lake, an actual place in the Adirondacks, was called Big Bittern Lake in Dreiser's novel.
A strikingly similar murder took place in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1934, when Robert Edwards clubbed Freda McKechnie, one of his two lovers, and placed her body in a lake. The cases were so similar that the press at the time dubbed the Edwards/McKechnie murder "The American Tragedy". Edwards was eventually found guilty, and also executed by electric chair.
The novel is a tragedy, Clyde's destruction being the consequence of his innate weaknesses: moral and physical cowardice, lack of scruples and self-discipline, muddled intellect, and unfocused ambition; additionally, the effect of his ingratiating (Dreiser uses the word "soft") social manner places temptation in his way which he cannot resist.
This novel is full of symbolism, ranging from Clyde's grotesque description of the high gloomy walls of the factory as an opportunity for success, symbolizing how it is all a mirage, to the description of girls as "electrifying" to foreshadow Clyde's destination to the electric chair; Dreiser transforms everyday mundane objects to symbols.
Dreiser sustains readers' interest in the lengthy novel (over 800 pages) by the accumulation of detail, and by continually varying the "emotional distance" of his writing from Clyde and other characters, from detailed examination of their thoughts and motivations to dispassionate reportage.