Sister Carrie author Theodore Dreiser, who earns a place on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list via his novel An American Tragedy (1925), was born today in Indiana in 1871. He died in 1945.An American Tragedy, made into the Elizabeth Taylor-Montgomery Clift film A Place in the Sun (1951) and a Met opera (2005), was based on the 1906 Grace Brown murder case in New York. Chester Gillette was convicted of the crime and died in the electric chair on March 30, 1908. An American Tragedy was banned in Boston in 1927, with one court charging that the book "manifestly tend[ed] to corrupt the morals of youth."
