My mother used to be an English teacher and generally put Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy on her syllabus, so that big fat paperback was always around the house. Eventually I picked it up and read it myself, and more recently I wrote a suite101 article on the crime that inspired Dreiser's novel, just because it's kind of haunting. The novel later became the basis for the 1950s movie A Place in the Sun, although I think A Place in the Sun was too romanticized and essentially a vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. The real film version seems yet to be done--something that makes Roberta Alden/Grace Brown less of a harpy and captures more of the 1906 era and upstate New York backdrop.

Another book based on the Grace Brown murder is Jennifer Donnelly's A Northern Light, and she does a very nice job of portraying that particular time and place through the eyes of a girl working at the resort hotel where the death occurred. A Northern Light is put into the category of young adult fiction, but as one reviewer pointed out, it's definitely recommended reading for anyone interested in the case of an ambitious young man and a naive young woman, an unwanted pregnancy and a fateful boat ride....