Émile Zola is considered to the big daddy of Naturalism. He's the guy who kick-started the movement in the 1860s in France, by attempting to write a new kind of novel. Zola was heavily influenced...

Theodore Dreiser gives us a double dose of Naturalism, American-style. (American-style Naturalism has American cheese on it.) Not surprisingly, given his tone and subject matter, Dreiser started of...

Frank Norris was an American writer from Chicago. He spent some time in Paris as a young man, where he read (yup) Émile Zola. Zola's books influenced him, as well as Darwin's theories on evolution...

Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize… and dang if she didn't deserve it. She won it in 1921 for her novel The Age of Innocence, which (spoiler alert) is about people acting...

Stephen Crane is most known for his novel The Red Badge of Courage, one of the most famous novels about the American Civil War, which: uplifting! (If by uplifting, you mean possibly the bleakest ch...