The New York Times-20080128-Diary Revisits -American Tragedy-- -Brief-

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Diary Revisits 'American Tragedy'; [Brief]

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On March 30, 1908, Chester Gillette, 25, was executed at Auburn State Prison in New York for the murder of his pregnant lover, Grace Brown, on an Adirondack lake in 1906. His sensational trial inspired the Theodore Dreiser novel An American Tragedy, the 1951 film A Place in the Sun and an opera staged by the Metropolitan Opera. Now, as the 100th anniversary of Gillette's electrocution approaches, Hamilton College has published The Prison Diary and Letters of Chester Gillette, taken from papers donated to the college last year by Gillette's grandniece, Marlynn McWade-Murray, The Associated Press reported. The editors, Jack Sherman and Craig Brandon, said Gillette's writings offer neither an explicit admission of guilt nor any clear assertion of innocence, but they do provide a window into his character and his metamorphosis in prison from a blithe youth into an introspective, compassionate, religious adult. In the penultimate entry in the diary, Gillette wrote: In all that I have done, I hope I have done as men would have me do. I know that I am right with God, and that is the all important thing.