The novel was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

In 1951, a movie called, A Place in the Sun, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, and Raymond Burr (great cast), was based on this novel. It received a total of six Oscars, and was nominated for Best Picture.

Raised by poor and devoutly-religious parents, who force him to participate in their street missionary work, the ambitious but naïve Clyde is anxious to achieve better things. His troubles begin when he takes a job as a bell-boy at a local hotel. The boys he meets are much more sophisticated than he, and they introduce Clyde to the world of alcohol and prostitution. Clyde enjoys his new lifestyle and does everything in his power to win the affections of the flirtatious Hortense Briggs. But Clyde’s life is forever changed when a stolen car he is traveling in with friends kills a young child. Clyde flees Kansas City, and after a brief stay in Chicago, he reestablishes himself as a foreman at the collar factory of his wealthy long-lost uncle in Lycurgus, New York, who meets Clyde through a stroke of fortune. Though he does not necessarily adopt Clyde into the Lycurgus Griffiths family, he does his best to help Clyde and advances him to a position of relative importance within his collar factory.

Although Clyde vows not to consort with women in the way that caused his Kansas City downfall, he is swiftly attracted to Roberta Alden, a poor and very innocent farmgirl working under him — thus breaking the factory rules. While Clyde initially enjoys the secretive relationship and virtually coerces Roberta into sex, his ambition forces him to realize that he could never marry her. He dreams of the elegant Sondra Finchley, the daughter of a wealthy Lycurgus man and a family friend of his uncle’s. As developments between him and Sondra begin to look promising, Roberta discovers that she is pregnant.

Having unsuccessfully attempted to procure an abortion for Roberta, who expects him to marry her, Clyde procrastinates while his relationship with Sondra continues to mature. When he realizes that he has a genuine chance to marry Sondra and after Roberta pushes an ultimatum of marriage or revealing their relationship, Clyde hatches a plan to murder Roberta in a fashion that would seem accidental.

When he takes Roberta for a canoe ride on Big Bittern lake in upstate New York, Clyde rows into a remote portion of the lake. As he speaks to her regarding the end of their relationship Roberta moves towards him. As she does so Clyde strikes Roberta in the face with his camera, stunning her and upsetting the boat to the point that it capsizes. Unable to swim and Clyde unwilling to save her, Roberta drowns while Clyde swims to shore. The narrative is deliberately unclear as to whether he acted with malice and intent to murder or if his striking her was merely instinct. The trail of circumstantial evidence points to murder, and the local authorities are only too eager to convict Clyde. Following a sensational trial before an unsympathetic audience, despite a vigorous defense by two lawyers hired by his uncle, Clyde is found guilty and sentenced to death. The jailhouse scenes and the correspondence between Clyde and his mother stand out as exemplars of pathos in modern literature.