American literary history tends to minimize the contributions of early-20th-century naturalists like Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and James T. Farrell. That’s particularly sad in the case of Dreiser, whose two major novels, Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925), are still remarkable for their painstaking psychological portraits of men — one middle-aged (Sister Carrie’s George Hurstwood), one young (An American Tragedy’s Clyde Griffiths) — destroyed by uncontrollable impulses that run against the hard grain of fixed social realities. Hurstwood, a respectable, married restaurant manager, falls hopelessly in love with a young woman from the provinces trying to crawl out of a mean factory-slave existence. Griffiths, the son of Midwestern evangelists, longs for the sensual pleasures his upbringing has proselytized against and the life of ease his family’s poverty has denied him. Moving East, given employment by a rich uncle, he enters into his first sexual relationship, with Roberta, a factory girl in the department he supervises (a liaison expressly against company rules). Then, without warning, he tumbles into paradise — a romance with Sondra, a beauty in his cousins’ enchanted aristocratic circle.

The Library of America’s new edition of An American Tragedy, which continues the work of this admirable press in refurbishing the reputations of neglected writers, is a revelation. At this point, the updated 1951 movie version, A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens and starring Montgomery Clift, is far better known than the book itself. (An earlier adaptation, in 1931, so dismayed Dreiser that he picketed the premiere. He died six years before the release of A Place in the Sun.) Stevens’s film is beautifully made and acted, but it romanticizes the characters out of recognition.

Dreiser’s Clyde is both sensitive and pliable, privately resentful of his family’s "shabby" life and of the humiliating spectacle they force him into leading hymns and prayers on the streets of Kansas City. He "brought a more vivid and intelligent imagination to things, and was constantly thinking of how he might better himself if he had a chance" — but he suffers from a vanity out of keeping with his socio-economic position. Dreiser calls him "one of those interesting individuals who looked upon himself as a thing apart — never quite wholly and indissolubly merged with the family of which he was a member, and never with any profound obligations to those who had been responsible for his coming into the world." Moreover, he writes, "Clyde had a soul that was not destined to grow up. He lacked decidedly that mental clarity and inner directing application that in so many permits them to sort out from the facts and avenues of life the particular thing or things that make for their direct advancement."

When these qualities and the deprivations of his childhood come in contact with the allure of the American dream of upward mobility and the unforgiving class system that gives it the lie, Clyde is framed for calamity. Roberta, who initially represents his ascension into sexual maturity, becomes "the end of all his dreams," whereas the thought of the glittering Sondra "had a bite and ache for him that was almost unendurable." Roberta winds up drowned, and Clyde is charged with her murder.

The 19th-century models the American naturalists sought to emulate, like Zola, thought of their works as case studies, and An American Tragedy is as compelling an example as any novel I’ve read. That’s why it’s easy to overlook Dreiser’s flaws as a writer — the repetitiveness and oftentimes banality of his prose. The book runs close to a thousand pages, but his style, a peculiarly American mix of the formal and the vernacular, replete with driving, restless sentence fragments, hauls you through it. So do his psychological insights, which suggest the merciless stripping away of the characters in Dostoyevsky. This passage pinpoints Clyde’s ability to convey sentiment for the hapless Roberta after it’s ceased to be genuine: "There was about Clyde at times a certain strain of tenderness, evoked by experiences, disappointments, and hardships in his own life. . . . At such times he had a soft and melting voice. His manner was as tender and gentle almost as that of a mother with a baby. . . . [But] it was like the rush and flutter of a summer storm — soon come and soon gone." Dreiser is describing Method acting applied to a sexual relationship, and like so much in this marathon of a novel, it feels utterly, pitilessly true.