SOURCE: "Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy," in The Courtroom as Forum: Homicide Trials by Dreiser, Wright, Capote, and Mailer, Peter Lang, 1996, pp. 9-39.

In the following essay, Algeo explores Dreiser's nonfictional sources for An American Tragedy.

Theodore Dreiser, introduced to the world of crime as a young reporter in St. Louis, became especially interested in unusual homicide cases. Dreiser collected clippings of these cases as they appeared in the newspapers. He was not alone in his fascination. Murder trials "dominated public attention in the twenties in a way rivaled by no other category of public or private events except sports and the movies" (Brazil 163). Dreiser had for some time considered writing a book about a murderer, and eventually used his collection of unusual homicides to develop "a paradigm of the socially and economically motivated murder" which became the crime at the core of An American Tragedy published in...