Some of Bread's most obvious literary precedents came from the pen of Norris's brother, Frank Norris. Similar to Bread in both the naturalistic style and political import, novels by Frank Norris such as The Octopus (1901) and McTeague (1899) describe the lives of characters trapped either by their own ambition or by impossibly strong social forces. Just as Charles Norris uses one woman's story to point to American society's callousness regarding the desperate poverty single women must endure, Frank Norris critiques the heartlessness of the railroad and wheat industries through a few characters in The Octopus. In McTeague, he shows how ambition simultaneously drives an individual to extremes and lays a trap that forces him or her to endure the consequences of desire. Though Jeannette's ambition in Bread is not as severe as that which drives the title character of McTeague to murder, it does leave her lonely...