Murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in the United States, inspiration for Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

Grace Mae Brown was an American woman who was murdered by her boyfriend, Chester Gillette, on Big Moose Lake, New York, after she told him she was pregnant. The murder, and the subsequent trial of the suspect, attracted national newspaper attention.

Chester Ellsworth Gillette was an American convicted murderer who became the basis for the fictional character Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy. The novel, and thus Gillette's case indirectly, was adapted in turn for the 1931 film An American Tragedy and the 1951 film A Place in the Sun.

Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best-known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).

An American Tragedy is a 1925 novel by American writer Theodore Dreiser. He began the manuscript in the summer of 1920, but a year later, abandoned most of that text. It was based on the notorious murder of Grace Brown in 1906, and the trial of her lover, Chester Gillette. In 1923 Dreiser returned to the project and, with the help of his future wife Helen and editor-secretaries Louise Campbell and Sally Kusell, completed the massive novel in 1925. The book entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2021.