Posted on 03/30/2021 12:03:16 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
Theodore Dreiser‘s classic novel An American Tragedy was inspired by an infamous 1906 murder whose author, Chester Gillette, was electrocuted at Auburn Prison on this date in 1908.
It was a crime tailor-made for the burgeoning mass media, popular and pretty 20-year-old Grace Brown gone to work at the Cortland, N.Y. Gillette Skirt Factory where the owner’s nephew seduced and impregnated her.
That, of course, is our man Chester Gillette, who further distressed his lover by tomcatting around town, especially charging the love triangle with class rivalry with his rumored interest in a socialite while he stalled for time with Ms. Brown. Dreiser’s novel — which is freely available from the public domain — spins on this axis, although the real-life heiress in question put out an arch press release averring that “I have never been engaged to Chester E. Gillette … Our acquaintance was of … a limited duration.”
That was also true of Gillette’s acquaintance with Grace Brown. At length he induced the future mother of his child to elope to the Adirondacks upon the apparent prospect of finally regularizing their situation. Instead, after making a couple of stops in upstate New York, they paused on July 11 at Big Moose Lake for a nice canoe outing. While out on the water, Gillette bashed his lover’s head with his tennis racket and forced her into the water to drown....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
800+ pages I believe. Probably worth the time. Manchester’s “American Caesar’ wasn’t. Atlas Shrugged definitely was. Should we?
Who doesn’t?
“He took his tennis racket while canoeing?”
Sifting for minnows, most likely. The guy was framed! FRAMED, I tells ya!
*SMIRK* ;)
P.S. It’s high time for more tennis racket laws! Guns don’t kill people; Tennis Rackets kill people! *SNORT*
Maybe he heard a rumor of a government plot to ban private ownership of high capacity tennis rackets, and planned for it to be lost in a boating accident.
Book recommendation:
“’The Executioner’s Song’ is a Pulitzer Prize–winning true crime novel by Norman Mailer that depicts the events related to the execution of Gary Gilmore for murder by the state of Utah. The title of the book may be a play on ‘The Lord High Executioner’s Song’ from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.”
Also, Tommy Lee Jones turned in a stellar performance as Gary Gilmore in the TV movie of the same title. I remember watching it; a few parts over multiple Sunday evenings, I think? Mailer wrote the screenplay, too.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/executioners_song
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