SOURCE: Lehan, Richard. “American Literary Naturalism: The French Connection.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38, no. 4 (March 1984): 545-57.

In the following essay, Lehan traces the connections between Norris and the French writer Émile Zola.

There was no American novelist who covered the panorama of economic and historical activity of a Zola [Émile Zola]. But collectively there were hundreds of novels which did for America after the Civil War what Zola did for the Second Empire. Indeed, the aftermath of the Civil War in America parallels the kind of historical changes taking place in France between 1848 and 1870 as both economies moved from a landed to a commercial/industrial world. In America this period witnessed the rapid growth of cities, the rise of corporate businesses, the influx of immigrant labor, and the practice of wretched working conditions. One commentator has put it: “The result was an all but incredible skyrocketing of industrial production. From...