The purpose of this research is to examine the status and scope of scholarly literary criticism related to Theodore Dreiser, particularly the novel An American Tragedy. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical and social context in which critical commentary relevant to the novel has significance, and then to describe and present an evaluation of the pattern of ideas that appears to have developed around An American Tragedy, both at the time of its initial publication and in the current period.
To say that An American Tragedy is a novel of early twentieth-century social criticism that can be connected in subject matter and pattern of ideas to the well-known fact of Dreiser's own connection with radical politics of the period is almost a commonplace, even though insight into the content of that connection has undoubtedly enriched modern reading of the novel (Shapiro passim; Warren passim). But the critical judgment of An American Tragedy as social criticism or even as psychological realism seems to belong to an exercise more appropriate to an earlier generation. More recent criticism has focused less on genre positioning than on the social context in which Dreiser's social critique might have emerged.
For example, the fact that the book appears to have been a popular commercial as well as critical success at the time of first publication may seem remarkable given the sundry cultural forces at work on the American landscape in 1925, when it was first written. An American Tragedy was part of what Frederick Lewis Allen describes as the mid-twenties "revolt of the highbrows" against a "middle class majority [that had] turned from persecuting political radicals [during the early-twenties Big Red Scare] to regulating personal conduct" (Allen 189) by way of assorted community-based moral crusades throughout the country. Curiously, however, the textual content of An American Tragedy, which might have been perceived duri...