An American Tragedy

Ambitious, but ill-educated, naïve, and immature, Clyde Griffiths is raised by poor and devoutly religious parents to help in their street missionary work. As a young adult, Clyde must, to help support his family, take menial jobs as a soda jerk, then a bellhop at a prestigious Kansas City hotel. There, his more sophisticated colleagues introduce him to bouts of social drinking and sex with some of the hotel's female guests and with prostitutes.


Enjoying his new lifestyle, Clyde becomes infatuated with Hortense Briggs, who persuades Clyde to buy her an expensive jacket. When Clyde learns Hortense desires his colleague Sparser, not him, as a lover, he becomes jealous. Hortense repeatedly tells Clyde that she loves him, while getting him to buy her the jacket (for which they are overcharged by a stereotypically greedy Jewish shopkeeper).