SOURCE: "What Blood Will Tell: Hereditary Determinism in McTeague & Greed," in Texas Studies in Literature & Language, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 51-74.

In the following essay, Gardner examines the realism of Stroheim's films and Frank Norris's novels.

We Anglo-Saxons are a fighting race … Civilization is far from that time when the fighting man can be dispensed with.

—Frank Norris (Literary Criticism)

Against these assaults of inferiority … where can civilization look for its champions? Where but in the slender rank of the racially superior … this "thin red line" of rich, untainted blood which stands between us and barbarism or chaos.

—Lothrop Stoddard

In the short history of film's silent era there were five adaptations of stories by Frank Norris. Two of these, the first and last, were significant moments in the development of American cinema. D. W. Griffith's A Corner in Wheat (1909), a one-reel condensation of Norris's "A Deal in...