Frank Norris has been viewed as a significant literary critic in one major way. His principal and quite specific image for most has been that of a spokesman for the literary movement which first developed in France in the wake of Balzacian and Flaubertian realism and was then brought to 1890s America: literary naturalism, or Zolaism, as it was sometimes called. Norris is seen as its premier American apologist, offering a positive and even celebrative description of the qualities of naturalism which distinguished it from romanticism and realism. Thus, typical is C. Hugh Holman's picture of him as a touchstone figure in A Handbook to Literature (1980): he was the movement's "most vocal expounder as the century ended." To that cameo was added this enhancement: "Frank Norris ... wrote naturalistic novels in conscious imitation of Zola and made a critical defense of the school, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, in...