U. S. Tragedy

The Story* moves from west to east, from Kansas City to Sing Sing death chair. It is drab as a freight yard, long and unrelenting as a freight train, dismally disastrous as a fuddled driver and a grade crossing.

In the Griffiths family, the father preaches on the streets, the mother slaves at a mission, the daughter is seduced by a flashy actor, the son hops bells in the big hotel. This son, Clyde, is our hero.

He learns to drink, spoon and wench. His mind takes the shape of a pinchbeck, free-lunch conquistador's. He borrows a car, skids into a tight situation, scurries from town like a rodent.

Happening upon a rich uncle, he gets a job in the avuncular collar factory at Lycurgus, N. Y. His own neckwear improves. He sniffs wealth and position, smears oil on his hair and his manners. He puts afoot a promising campaign for the hand, body and prestige of Sondra Finchley, social princess of Lycurgus. While that plan is maturing, he cannot resist indulging in one of the factory girls, Roberta Alden. The physiological consequence is normal.

Void of purpose, just stewing frantically with the selfish desire to marry Sondra, the boy's mind involuntarily evolves, his hand spasmodically executes, the murder of Roberta. He bashes her with a camera, capsizes their canoe.

The law bays and quarters on his trail, runs him down. A prosecuting attorney who is out to wrest acclaim from society in compensation for a grotesque nose, causes "justice" to be done by "planting" some of the dead girl's hairs in a crevice of the camera. Clyde Griffiths goes to the death house, undergoes the torturing wait, passes through the little green door.

A heterogeneous ensemble of U. S. citizens employed to crowd the stages of these events, continues its multifarious human pursuits more or less unaffected.

The Significance. Standing before this bear-cage in the literary zoo we say: What an enormous creature! How shaggy and powerful! How he lumbers about, yet they say a grizzly can outrun a horse! And when we have gazed our fill, we say: What a dirty, littered cage! An unkempt bruted labor through it. Mr. Dreiser has declined to improve his knowledge of the English language, and while he is a painstaking reporter, he is a very indifferent craftsman. For him it is more honest to ramble on for 840 pages than to attempt compression and readable sentences. Genius gleams fitfully through the welter. Mr. Dreiser observes life broadly, with great detachment and a cumbersome irony not unlike Hardy's. He is at times mystical, but more often merely confused.

The Author, now aged 54, was brought up in Indiana by Germanic parentsdan admitted him to the University of Indiana but soon poverty took him back to Chicago. He struggled into journalism, but his shy, repressed nature handicapped him. He found marriage impossible and was granted his freedom. He has done special editorial work for various publishers, including the Butterick Publications (Delineator, Designer, New Idea), which he edited 1907 to 1910. He has never been a happy man, has never evolved a working philosophy beyond muddled hedonism Exhorted by his friends to write, he has, without ever creating a book of uniform excellence, achieved a place of prime importance in the minds of people who profess to know a great writer when they see him in the making. Sister Carrie (1900), a novel, was his first book. The Color of a Great City (1923), essays on Manhattan, was his most potent. Others: The Titan, Jennie Gerhardt, Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub. The Critics. Sherwood Anderson: "What a manpe and high purpose ... indefatigable and unconquerable." H. L. Mencken: "He stands isolated today, a figure weatherbeaten and lonely. Yet I know no American novelist who seems so secure or likely to endure.

Pure-in-Heart

SASHKA JIGOULEFFthe peasantry. Sashka Jigouleff is a young pure-in-heart who leaves home, mother and beloved to become a forest-dwelling bandit chief with a tattered rabble at his heels. He steels his gentle nature to burn, pillage and murder because these things seem necessary to the happiness of his "brothers of the wood." They prosper through one spring and summer, but when autumn frosts fasten home, the peasants desert their leader. He is killed in a beast's den by the police. The writing is more than usually filled with Slavic non-sequiturs and obscurity, yet it fascinates.

NON-FICTION

Pole Flight

OUR POLAR FLIGHT and thirty-six miles from the Pole, the shifting Arctic icepack cracking and crunching all about them, the six desperate adventurers had only two chances of escapeincredible labor and unbelievable endurance, they were in the air again and eight hours later were as safe as a church. "I believe that we confirmed Peary's observation that no land exists in the northern sector of the Arctic Ocean. But this cannot be absolutely decided until someone flies over." Thus Amundson gives science a cipher for this trip and begins his preparations for another.

*AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY