An American Tragedy · Characters
Character guide
Key figures in An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser.
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Clyde Griffiths
major
Also known as Clyde, Griffiths, Mr. Clyde Griffiths, young Griffiths, Mr. Griffiths
Clyde grows up dragged from city to city by evangelist parents whose street-corner piety makes him a target for other children's scorn, and the shame of it hardens into a fierce, unformed ambition. He is emotional, romantic, and endlessly calculating about how he might better himself, yet he has no practical training and no one to guide him. His longing to escape the shabby world of his parents is the engine that will carry him into Lycurgus and into everything that follows.
Roberta Alden
major
Also known as Roberta, Miss Alden, Bobbie, Miss Roberta Alden
Roberta arrives in Lycurgus from a hardscrabble farm family, takes a room in a respectable religious boardinghouse, and finds work in the collar factory where Clyde is her department head. She is cautious, proud, and quietly hungry for affection, and her growing attachment to Clyde collides with his mounting fascination with a world she cannot enter. Her jealousy, her decency, and her vulnerability make her the moral counterweight to everything Clyde is reaching for.
Sondra Finchley
major
Also known as Sondra, Sondra Finchley, the beautiful Sondra Finchley, Finchley
Sondra moves at the center of Lycurgus's smart young set, and her notice can lift an outsider into dances, house parties, and summer resorts. She is warm, vain, and generous in her way, drawn to Clyde partly because he is handsome and well-mannered and partly to spite her cousin Gilbert. Her attention becomes the measure of everything Clyde thinks he wants, and the gulf between her world and Roberta's is what tears his life in two.
Hortense Briggs
supporting
Also known as Hortense, this Hortense Briggs, the beautiful Hortense, Briggs
Hortense is the pretty, calculating girl in Clyde's bellhop circle, happy to be courted and driven about but never quite his. She wants nice things, admiration, and a better catch, and she plays the boys against each other without apology. Her teasing refusal is Clyde's first hard lesson in desire, expense, and the sting of being used, and it colors how he reads every woman after her.
Samuel Griffiths
supporting
Also known as Samuel, Mr. Samuel Griffiths, the Griffiths, Mr. Griffiths
Samuel Griffiths is a self-made Lycurgus industrialist, secure in his wealth, his name, and his place among the city's first families. He brings Clyde to Lycurgus out of a half-guilty sense of duty to his estranged brother Asa, then leaves the boy to find his own footing in a factory and a society that will not quite have him. His slow recognition that his own good intentions may have helped set the tragedy in motion gives the story its bitterest family reckoning.
Gilbert Griffiths
supporting
Also known as Gilbert, young Griffiths, Mr. Gilbert Griffiths, Gil
Gilbert is the polished, sharp-tongued young Griffiths who assumes the factory, the fortune, and the social field are his by right. The moment his father mentions a cousin who resembles him, Gilbert bristles with a jealousy he cannot quite name, and he treats Clyde with cold condescension from the start. His snobbery and rivalry set the terms of Clyde's humiliating apprenticeship in the family and in Lycurgus society.
Asa Griffiths
supporting
Also known as Asa, Mrs. Griffiths, Mrs. Asa Griffiths
Asa Griffiths runs a Kansas City mission with his wife, raising Clyde and three other children in a world of hymns, handouts, and chronic want. When his daughter Esta's scandal breaks, he paces and mutters 'Tst! Tst!' while his wife seizes the letter and retreats to a back room, leaving him visibly the weaker, more stricken of the two. His inability to convert faith into practical rescue of his own family is the first hard lesson Clyde absorbs about the uselessness of virtue without money.
Esta Griffiths
supporting
Also known as Esta
Esta vanishes from the mission with a traveling actor, then returns in disgrace and illness, forcing her mother to scrape together fifty dollars for medical care. The sum lands on Clyde at the exact moment he is hoarding the same amount for Hortense, and his lie to his mother about having no money becomes his first deliberate, shameful betrayal of family for appetite. Esta's ruin haunts the novel as the template Clyde both dreads and unconsciously repeats.
Orville Mason
supporting
Also known as Mr. Mason, Mason, Orville W. Mason, Orville
Mason is a small-county official with large ambitions, and Clyde's case arrives as the career-making opportunity he has been waiting for. He paints the defendant as a bearded, calculating seducer who traded a poor girl's life for a rich girl's hand, and he plays to the gallery of reporters and spectators with evident relish. His opening charge and cross-examinations shape how the jury, and the reader, weigh Clyde's guilt long before the defense has its say.
Alvin Belknap
supporting
Also known as Belknap, Mr. Belknap, Alvin, one Hon. Alvin Belknap
Belknap is the respectable face of Clyde's defense, a man whose local standing and legal caution are meant to offset Mason's fireworks. He counsels Clyde to sit straight and appear at ease before the writers and sketch artists, and he spends five grinding days helping pick a jury he knows is already half-convinced of guilt. His partnership with the sharper Jephson defines the defense's strategy and its limits.
Reuben Jephson
supporting
Also known as Jephson, Mr. Reuben Jephson, Mr. Jephson, Reuben
Jephson works alongside Belknap to arrange better meals for Clyde and to build a defense that will hinge on motive and intent rather than brute fact. His assurance that the case can be won becomes the thin thread Clyde hangs his sanity on in the cell, where visions of the electric chair drive him pacing at dawn. Whether Jephson's confidence is strategy or self-deception shapes the trial's final movement.
Bella Griffiths
supporting
Also known as Bella, Arabella, Bella Griffiths
Bella is the pampered daughter of the wealthy Griffiths household, impatient to be treated as grown and accustomed to her father's indulgence. She moves easily through the Lycurgus society that Clyde can only glimpse, and her offhand remarks about age and freedom expose the gulf between her world and his. Her presence in the novel measures exactly how far Clyde has climbed and how little the climb has actually bought him.
Thomas Ratterer
supporting
Also known as Tommy, Ratterer, Tom
Ratterer is Clyde's co-worker at the Green-Davidson and the doorway to a looser world: his mother's house, where young people pair off under a mother's startling indifference. He is generous, unpretentious, and entirely at home in the easy morals Clyde both craves and secretly disdains. His invitations give Clyde his first taste of courtship and belonging, setting in motion the hungers that will define him.
Oscar Hegglund
minor
Also known as Oscar, Hegglund, Oscar Hegglund
A bellhop colleague of Clyde in Chicago.
Walter Dillard
minor
Also known as Dillard, young Dillard, Walter
A bellhop acquaintance of Clyde.
Willard Sparser
minor
Also known as Sparser, Willard, the unfortunate Sparser
A friend of Clyde's from his hotel days.
Myra Griffiths
minor
Also known as Myra
Clyde's younger sister.
Jill Trumbull
minor
Also known as Jill, Miss Jill Trumbull, Miss Trumbull
A socialite friend of Sondra Finchley.
Bertine Cranston
minor
Also known as Bertine, Bertine Cranston, Cranston
A wealthy young woman in Lycurgus society.
Titus Alden
minor
Also known as Titus, Alden, the saddened Titus
Roberta's father, a poor farmer.
Louise Ratterer
minor
Also known as Louise, Louise Ratterer
Thomas Ratterer's sister.
Fred Heit
minor
Also known as Fred, Heit
A coroner involved in the investigation.
Duncan McMillan
supporting
Also known as the Reverend McMillan, McMillan, the Rev. Duncan McMillan, Reverend McMillan
McMillan is a country reverend drawn into Clyde's cell by duty and, gradually, by a genuine, unsettling compassion for the condemned. Where the law sees a case and the press a monster, he sees a soul struggling to confess and to believe in mercy. His patient presence turns the novel's final movement inward, forcing Clyde—and the reader—to weigh what sincerity can mean after so much evasion.
Orrin Short
minor
Also known as Orrin Short, Short
A friend of Clyde's from his hotel days.
Earl Newcomb
minor
Also known as Earl, Earl Newcomb, Newcomb
A bellhop colleague of Clyde.
Stuart Finchley
minor
Also known as Stuart, Stuart Finchley, Stew
Sondra's brother.
Rita Dickerman
minor
Also known as Rita, Rita Dickerman, the discarded Rita
A young woman Clyde becomes involved with in Lycurgus.
Burton Burleigh
minor
Also known as Burton, Burton Burleigh, Burleigh
A detective who investigates Roberta's death.
Greta Miller
minor
Also known as Greta Miller, Greta
A friend of Roberta's at the factory.
Grant Cranston
minor
Also known as young Grant Cranston, Cranston, Grant, Grant Cranston
A wealthy young man in Lycurgus society.
Darrah Brookhart
minor
Also known as Darrah Brookhart, Mr. Brookhart, Brookhart
A businessman in Lycurgus.
Joshua Whiggam
minor
Also known as Joshua Whiggam, Whiggam
A factory worker at the collar company.
Arthur Kinsella
minor
Also known as Kinsella, Arthur Kinsella
A detective involved in the case.
Miller Nicholson
minor
Also known as Miller Nicholson, Nicholson
A lawyer who assists the prosecution.
Harley Baggott
minor
Also known as Harley Baggott, Harley, Baggott
A young man in Lycurgus society.
Julia Griffiths
minor
Also known as Julia, Julie
Clyde's aunt, Samuel Griffiths' wife.
Zella Shuman
minor
Also known as Zella, Zella Shuman
A friend of Roberta's at the factory.
Elvira Griffiths
supporting
Also known as Mrs. Griffiths, Mrs. Elvira Griffiths, Elvira
Elvira Griffiths is a street-corner evangelist in Kansas City, raising her children on hymns, handouts, and the conviction that her family is spiritually set apart. Proud, self-sacrificing, and blind to how her public piety humiliates Clyde, she embodies the humble origins he spends the novel fleeing. When scandal breaks, her refusal to abandon him becomes both a rebuke and a mirror, exposing the cost of the very respectability he chased.
Emily Griffiths
minor
Also known as Emily, Em
Clyde's younger sister.
Martha Bordaloue
minor
Also known as Martha, Martha Bordaloue
A woman who testifies at the trial.
Violet Taylor
minor
Also known as VI, Violet Taylor, Violet
A young woman in Lycurgus.
Larry Doyle
minor
Also known as Doyle, Larry Doyle
A man who testifies at Clyde's trial.
George Newton
minor
Also known as George Newton, Newton, George
A man in Lycurgus society.
Bert Gettler
minor
Also known as Bert, Gettler, Gil, Bob
A friend and fellow bellhop of Clyde.
Constance Wynant
minor
Also known as Constance, Constance Wynant
A young woman in Lycurgus social circles.
Laura Sipe
minor
Also known as Laura, Laura Sipe
A woman who testifies at Clyde's trial.
Governor Waltham
minor
Also known as Governor Waltham, Waltham
The governor who considers Clyde's clemency appeal.
Nina Temple
minor
Also known as Nina, Nina Temple
A young woman in Lycurgus society.
Davis Higby
minor
Also known as Davis Higby, Higby, Davis
A supervisor at the collar factory.
Clifford Golden
minor
Also known as Clifford Golden, Clifford, Golden, Carl Graham
A man who resembles Clyde and is mentioned in the trial.
Gertrude Trumbull
minor
Also known as Gertrude, Gertrude Trumbull
A member of the Trumbull family in Lycurgus.
Maida Axelrod
minor
Also known as Maida, Maida Axelrod
A young woman in Lycurgus social circles.
Fred Gabel
minor
Also known as Fred Gabel, Gabel, Fred
A bellhop colleague of Clyde.
Doris Trine
minor
Also known as Doris Trine, Doris
A young woman in Lycurgus society.
Tina Kogel
minor
Also known as Tina Kogel, Kit
A young woman Clyde meets in Lycurgus.
Pasquale Cutrone
minor
Also known as Pasquale Cutrone, Pasquale, Cutrone
A bellhop colleague of Clyde.
Tracy Trumbull
minor
Also known as Tracy, Tracy Trumbull
A member of the Trumbull family.
Arabella Stark
minor
Also known as Arabella Stark, Stark, Bella
A young woman in Lycurgus society.
Burchard Taylor
minor
Also known as Burchard Taylor, Burchard, Taylor
A young man in Lycurgus.
Charlie Wilkens
minor
Also known as Wilkens, Charlie, Charlie Wilkens
A bellhop acquaintance of Clyde.
Wallace Trone
minor
Also known as Wallace Trone, the gifted Trone, Wallace
A friend of Clyde's from his hotel days.
Paul Shiel
minor
Also known as Shiel, Paul Shiel, Paul
A bellhop colleague of Clyde.
Ed Swenk
minor
Also known as young Swenk, Swenk, Ed Swenk
A bellhop friend of Clyde.
David Waltham
minor
Also known as Dave, David, the Hon. David Waltham
A politician involved in Clyde's case.
Scott Nicholson
minor
Also known as Scott Nicholson, Scott
A lawyer involved in the trial.
Legare Atterbury
minor
Also known as Legare Atterbury, Atterbury
A wealthy man in Lycurgus.
Wynette Phant
minor
Also known as Wynette, Wynette Phant
A young woman in Lycurgus society.
Frederick Sells
minor
Also known as Freddie Sells, Freddie, Fred, Frederick, Frederick Sells
A bellhop colleague of Clyde.
Zillah Saunders
minor
Also known as Zillah Saunders, Zillah
A young woman in Lycurgus society.
Nadine Harriet
minor
Also known as Nadine, Nadine Harriet, Harriet
A young woman in Lycurgus.
Perley Haynes
minor
Also known as Perley Haynes
A witness in the trial.
Tom Keary
minor
Also known as Keary, Tom Keary
A young man mentioned in Lycurgus social circles.
Thomas Lucas
minor
Also known as Thomas Lucas, Tom
A bellhop acquaintance of Clyde.
Kittie Keane
minor
Also known as Kittie Keane, Kittie
A young woman in Lycurgus.
Vanda Steele
minor
Also known as Vanda Steele, Miss Vanda Steele, Vanda
A young woman in Lycurgus society.
Blanche Locke
minor
Also known as Blanche Locke
A young woman in Lycurgus.
Edna Patterson
minor
Also known as Edna Patterson
A young woman in Lycurgus.
Elizabeth Griffiths
minor
Also known as Bettina, Libby, Elizabeth Griffiths
Clyde's cousin.
