by Theodore Dreiser (1925)

This fictionalization of a real-life murder in the Adirondacks pits a young man of limited means against his own dreams of social acceptance among the wealthy. After a child’s accidental death, Clyde Griffiths flees the Midwest to fictional Lycurgus, N.Y., to become a middle manager in his uncle’s shirt factory. He is accused of murdering his pregnant girlfriend to preserve his chances with the charming daughter of a local blue blood. The truth, however, is more complicated than that.

Note: Dreiser’s thinly veiled broadside against the materialism of the Roaring ’20s was published the same year as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.