An American Tragedy (1925) is a novel by the American writer Theodore Dreiser.

Dreiser based the book on a notorious criminal case. On July 11, 1906, resort owners found an overturned boat and the body of 20-year-old Grace Brown at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. Chester Gillette was put on trial and convicted of killing Brown, though he claimed that her death was an accident. Gillette was executed by electric chair on March 30, 1908.[1] The murder trial drew international attention when Brown's love letters to Gillette were read in court. Dreiser saved newspaper clippings about the case for several years before writing his novel, during which he studied the case closely. He based Clyde Griffiths on Chester Gillette, deliberately giving him the same initials.

The 1951 Paramount Pictures film A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, is strongly based on the novel, and is considered one of the finest dramatic films made in the 1950s.

In 2005, the book was placed on Time Magazine's list of the top 100 novels written in English since 1923.