English · Advanced
Read An American Tragedy in Englishwith every sentence explained
Theodore Dreiser · 1925
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About the book
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser was first published in 1925. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction, mystery and crime and romance. It runs to about 353,800 words.
He wants money, beauty and a place among the rich. He will pay any price to get them.
Clyde Griffiths grows up singing hymns on street corners with his poor, devout missionary parents in Kansas City, and he hates every minute of it. All around him he sees what he wants instead: fine clothes, smart hotels, pretty girls, people who never have to worry. A job as a bellboy in a grand hotel gives him his first taste of that glittering world.
Then a chance meeting with a wealthy uncle brings him to a small New York factory town, where the family name opens doors he never imagined. Clyde is charming, ambitious and weak, and soon he is torn between the factory girl who loves him and the society beauty who could make all his dreams come true.
Inspired by a real-life criminal case, Theodore Dreiser's huge, gripping novel is a classic of American literature and became the film A Place in the Sun.
- Author
- Theodore Dreiser
- First published
- 1925
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Mystery and Crime, Romance
- Length
- About 353,800 words
How it opens
Dusk—of a summer night.
And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants—such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.
And up the broad street, now comparatively hushed, a little band of six—a man of about fifty, short, stout, with bushy hair protruding from under a round black felt hat, a most unimportant-looking person, who carried a small portable organ such as is customarily used by street preachers and singers.
Reading An American Tragedy in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
