"Your Name in the Papers": Newspaper (Un)Coverage in An American Tragedy

When the narrator of An American Tragedy calls Roberta Alden's father "one of that vast company of individuals who are born, pass through and die out of the world without ever quite getting any one thing straight," those people who "appear, blunder, and die in a fog," he might as well be talking about the novel's hapless protagonist Clyde Griffiths. Indeed, when the narrator calls Alden and his wife "excellent examples of that native type of Americanism which resists facts and reveres illusions" (279), he acknowledges that these characters are more representatives of a culture than unique members of it. Theodore Dreiser is well known for his fictional depictions of the tragic social forces acting upon individuals; as a former newspaper reporter, he was well acquainted with the horrors that plagued people oppressed by poverty, crime, and disease. He wrote novels in part to expose and critique the operation of such forces. What has not been fully explored in An American Tragedy, however, is Dreiser's depiction of the newspaper industry as one of those tragically deterministic social forces.

For Dreiser, writing in 1925, the success of the newspaper industry must have been disturbing evidence of the American phenomenon exemplified in the Aldens, that of reverence for illusion over fact. Newspapers as Dreiser depicts them in An American Tragedy purport to be beacons of truth and sources of information reliable enough to be legitimate bases for life-and-death judgments such as whether Clyde Griffiths is innocent or guilty of murder; yet, even while cultivating the illusion that they were factual, newspapers also regarded themselves, and were regarded by readers, as sources of entertainment, as modern-day storybooks. Many newspapers of the early twentieth century, like the tabloids of today, were open about the fact that they sensationalized and exaggerated facts to make a better story and sell more papers. Yet readers both then and now have had varying degrees of awareness of the illusory nature of newspapers. People like the Aldens and Clyde Griffiths never realized this illusory nature. In An American Tragedy, Dreiser responds to Americans' widespread credulity in reading the newspapers by attempting to show just how deceptive and incomplete, not to mention unethical, newspapers' coverage of events can be. As Shelley Fisher Fishkin puts it, Dreiser wrote "in large part to help [Americans] take a fresh look" at "important facts about themselves, their morality, their country, and their dreams" (117).¹ Fishkin notes that Dreiser shows the limitations of many different genres besides newspaper articles in An American Tragedy; Mrs. Griffiths's religious mottoes, for instance, are as insufficient as newspaper articles in representing reality and providing guidance for how to live life. Dreiser also shows that the novel itself has limitations, for Clyde's story frustrates the promises of the Horatio Alger novel: the very pathway that leads Clyde to wealth also leads him to murder. Fishkin makes the important point, also, that for Dreiser even a novel as epic as An American Tragedy cannot fully depict the vast complexity of the universe, even if it captures more than the newspaper article can. For example, Dreiser leaves ambiguous the precise cause of Roberta's death and the authenticity of Clyde's conversion to Christianity while on death row (129). In the end, though, the newspaper article remains the more limited genre because at least the novel can leave room for ambiguity, whereas the newspaper article tends to be misleadingly determinate.

By the early twentieth century, the newspaper industry was ripe for critique, for by then it had become central to American life. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, printing was cheaper and easier than before, so newspapers reached ever-wider circulations of readers at lower costs. In his autobiographical works, Dreiser describes his brief career as a reporter in the early 1890s.² As a young man, Dreiser worked for a series of newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New York. Dreiser chose this career because he was captivated by the glamour and opportunity the newspapers represented to him as the son of...