Today, critics find it easy to agree that Frank Norris' novels hold a significant place in the history of American literature, even though there is little agreement about their worth as pieces of fiction. Norris usually ends up being grouped with such naturalistic writers as Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos despite the fact that they both produced their most significant works more than twenty years after his death. His works fit so strongly in with the writers that followed him that critics who are not careful tend to forget what his world was actually like, and they obscure his true importance as a forerunner and visionary.

From the very start, there has been little agreement among critics about the value of Norris' works. Some critics found his characterizations moving, while others found them trite. Some felt that he changed the nature of intellectual discourse with...