I received two recent prompts to read Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel about a murder in the Adirondacks. A friend whose taste I trust recommended it, having picked it up because a grandchild was reading it for school. And in her Adirondack Life essay about novels set in the Adirondacks, Amy Godine — who is always worth listening to — asked, “Why haven’t we all read this book?”

Dreiser’s novel (its 800 pages might be part of the answer to Amy Godine’s question) is based on the real-life murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette at Big Moose Lake, near Inlet, in 1906. The crime was well publicized, and Dreiser spent years researching it, visiting the Adirondacks and Sing Sing, though Gillette was executed in Auburn.

Dreiser renamed the characters — Roberta Alden, Clyde Griffith — but the outlines of the factual and fictional stories are quite similar. Clyde Griffith romances and impregnates Roberta Alden. She seeks marriage, he seeks freedom. They travel to the Adirondacks, where she hopes for a wedding while he has planned her murder.

Dreiser’s descriptions of early Adirondack travel trains from Utica, livery from the station to local lodges, rowboats on the quiet lake — are some of the Adirondack local color. There is also the compelling contrast of the Adirondack beauty and Clark Griffith’s ugly plan. Roberta Alden looks from the boat and says, “Isn’t it still and peaceful … I think it’s beautiful, truly.” It is in that beauty that Clark has planned Roberta’s drowning.

Perhaps more compelling than the Adirondack scenes is the social structure the author describes — the monotony of factory work, women’s limited freedom, the hypocrisy surrounding sexuality. Dreiser’s fictional Kansas City and Chicago mirror the mores in Gillette’s central New York town.

The second half of the novel is devoted to the investigation, trial and execution. During the trial, the correspondence between the lovers is read by the prosecutor. The distance between what Clyde Griffith presented in his letters to Roberta and his plans for her drowning, as well as her inability to see the horror sitting in the boat with her on that beautiful Adirondack lake, provides “An American Tragedy” the gravity that has made it a classic.