The writing is super realistic and the story is based on a true crime. On one level, the story is about a young man, Clyde, who comes from a poor excessively religious family and struggles against his upbringing. He is passionate and sensual, what we would consider today a normal young adult, who wants an easier life and has a normal sex drive. His dilemma is that his family is the poor branch of a very wealthy family, his father having been disinherited by his grandfather in favor of Clyde's two uncles. Clyde himself, by taking a job at his wealthy uncle's factory, places himself on the cusp of two worlds. In one world, he is a lowly factory employee. In the other world, he is a relative to a wealthy and powerful local family. On the one hand, he is loath to associate with the lower class that he occupies in case his family chooses to recognize him. On the other hand, his snooty relatives are loath to associate with him.

It all comes to a head because of his passionate nature. He gets a girl pregnant and here the class difference is put under a microscope. The wealthy class, when they err, can get an illegal abortion simply and their lives continue on as before. But the poor are shackled to their mistakes. And that is the heart of the tragedy, especially when you add in that Clyde, because of his class and religious upbringing, knows nothing about birth control.

The book was written in 1925 and as I was reading it I was thinking boy we have it so easy now with universally available birth control and some access to legal abortions (limited by where you happen to live). So this situation is a sad reminder of how people's lives were destroyed by their ignorance about sex and universal societal condemnation of anyone who erred. But as I was reading along about a man stifled by a religiously strict upbringing that views sex outside of marriage as a sin almost equivalent to murder, what happens but the Atlanta murders by a man raised in a strict religious sect that views sex outside of marriage as a sin almost equivalent to murder. So much for thinking that all of this was left behind in the bad old days.

There were moments when the book felt very long, but then Dreiser explained why he was delving so deeply into the backgrounds of his characters. Overall, he did an amazing job of inhabiting them and that is main strength of the book -- the thought processes of each person are given in exquisite detail so that you fully understand why they did what they did. And even my edition was over 800 pages long, it was fascinating to read.