Word: dreiser
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...story petered out; and now a juicy murder just as the Hauptmann case seemed to head downhill. But they also should have offered a grateful word to Cinema. For it was the millions who had seen the film of An American Tragedy, not the thousands who had plugged through Dreiser's two-volume novel, that lifted the Wilkes-Barre story from a cheap, provincial homicide to a seven-day sensation...
Some 50 crack reporters, sob-sisters, cameramen, ranging from the august New York Times to the Polish Everybody's Record jammed the press tables in Luzerne County Courthouse at Wilkes-Barre. Most conspicuous of all was the hulking, white-crowned figure of Author Dreiser. Rip-snorting Publisher Julius David Stern, who has been trying to transform the ancient New York Post into a wild-&-woolly liberal sheet, had hired Dreiser to cover the trial for the Post, the Philadelphia Record, and a syndicate string. Author Dreiser was also covering for Mystery Magazine...
...parallel really lay between the Edwards case and that of Chester E. Gillette; of Cortland, N. Y. which Author Dreiser had drably copied into his book, even to giving his hero the same initials?Clyde Griffith. It was 28 years ago that Chester Gillette, raised in a sternly religious atmosphere, got a job as foreman in a rich relative's collar factory. He took up with a pretty factory girl, Grace Brown, but, by the time she became pregnant, Gillette, socially ambitious, had been taken up by another girl, an "heiress." He took Grace Brown to Big Moose Lake...
...reporting the Gillette case as An American Tragedy (the second volume is almost a stenographic record of the trial) Author Dreiser made Society the villain for having endowed Clyde Griffiths with a sordid background and for tormenting him with emotional stresses with which he was not equipped to deal. (The film version, starring Phillips Holmes and Sylvia Sidney, angered Dreiser to the point of trying to keep it off the screen because, he complained, it slighted the Dreiser sociology...
...Dreiser's report of the Wilkes-Barre trial last week likewise was an indictment of the "system." And, like the novel, his accounts were turgid, myopic, verbose, sorely needing the astringent blue pencil of a copy desk. He seemed to be arguing that had the boy had more money, he would not have got himself or his girl into trouble. Clearest point: "I am inclined to agree with the French that crimes which concern love and passion and the ambition of youth are nothing which the law, in its cold, calculating and in the main commercial mood, should have anything...