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Jul 04, 2011
Clyde Griffiths, protagonist of this classic novel, is a weak, incompetent, amoral young man who pursues the American dream with disastrous results. He reaches for social status and wealth, but all crashes about him after he drowns his lover and their unborn child. Caught, convicted, and sentenced to death by the electric chair, his life is a tragedy. Dreiser explores the process in a very long book that has a plehtora of tedious detail and exposition. Read it once, maybe, but not twice.