Murder victim is memorialized

Grace Brown headed to the Adirondack Mountains hoping for a marriage proposal. Instead, authorities said the pregnant woman was murdered by her lover in a sorrowful saga that became the basis for Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, “An American Tragedy.”

The story was later spun into an Oscar-winning movie (retitled “A Place in the Sun”), television programs, plays, songs, true-crime books and most recently an opera on the Metropolitan Opera stage.

In observance of the 100th anniversary of the killing, two of Brown’s relatives and about 50 other people gathered Tuesday for the unveiling of a historical marker at Big Moose Lake in New York, where she died.