SOURCE: "An American Tragedy: Constitutional Violations," in The Dreiser Newsletter, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring, 1978, pp. 11-19.

In the following essay, Rosenman examines the violations of the United States Constitution committed in the trial of Clyde Griffiths and of Chester Gillette, the man on whom Dreiser based his protagonist.

Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy was first published in 1925. Nineteen years earlier, on July 11, 1906, Chester E. Gillette, the prototype of Clyde Griffiths, the main character of the novel, allegedly drowned a young woman named Grace Brown in Herkimer County, New York. On March 20, 1908, Gillette was electrocuted for this crime. Clyde Griffiths, his fictional counterpart, accused of drowning his pregnant girlfriend, Roberta Alden, also received the death penalty, although there was no witness to the occurrence and the accused claimed the drowning was accidental. Thus, Clyde was convicted on what seems purely circumstantial evidence. But was the circumstantial evidence really "pure"? To...