The turn of the twentieth century saw the heyday of a new kind of novel, written by the school of so-called naturalists: in Europe, most notably Zola; and, in the United States, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser.1 The maturity of naturalistic fiction and the infancy of film thus coincide: the emphasis placed by the naturalists on documentary detail, on representative characters with the quality of single-dimensional cartoons, and the appeal of these writers to a wide, proletarian audience, link the school of naturalistic novelists more than fortuitously to the emergent new art of cinema. The early filmmakers drew not only upon such proven stage successes as East Lynne and Uncle Tom's Cabin, or upon such immensely popular novels of the preceding age as those of Dickens. They turned as well for material to the contemporary novel; in particular to the naturalistic novel, with its larger than life characters, and its concern with maintaining an element of romance even in the midst of documentary realism (a colloca- tion which the chief American explicator of the genre, Norris, had insisted upon). In addition, to mention only the major directors, Griffith used Norris himself in A Corner in Wheat, DeMille used David Graham Phillips in Old Wives for New, and Stroheim used Norris again in Greed.