SOURCE: Lehan, Richard. “American Literary Naturalism: The French Connection.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 38, no. 4 (March 1984): 545-57.

[In the following essay, Lehan traces the connections between Norris and the French writer Émile Zola.]

There was no American novelist who covered the panorama of economic and historical activity of a Zola [Émile Zola]. But collectively there were hundreds of novels which did for America after the Civil War what Zola did for the Second Empire. Indeed, the aftermath of the Civil War in America parallels the kind of historical changes taking place in France between 1848 and 1870 as both economies moved from a landed to a commercial/industrial world. In America this period witnessed the rapid growth of cities, the rise of corporate businesses, the influx of immigrant labor, and the practice of wretched working conditions. One commentator has put it: “The result was an all but incredible skyrocketing of industrial production. From the Civil War to 1900, capital invested in manufacturers increased … five or six times over; the money value of factory products mounted with similar speed; and in certain basic industries, such as steel, the growth in productive output was immensely larger even than this. Correspondingly, the number of cities of 8,000 or more inhabitants at least trebled.”¹ Many of the American writers depict this economic transition from the point of view of the upper classes, and thus their position differs markedly from Zola's sympathy toward a proletariat and an emerging working class; but even among the more conservative writers in America, we find an increasing sympathy for the hardships of the new poor and a growing distrust with a system that can be corrupted by the new forces of big business. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, for example, sympathetically depicts the plight of mill workers in The Silent Partner (1871), and other novels which treat workers or the poor are Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Stillwater Tragedy (1880), Amanda Douglas's Hope Mills (1880), Mary Hallock Foote's Coeur d'Alene (1894), and Francis Hopkinson Smith's Tom Grogan (1896). Novels which depict the rise of speculative finance and industrial wealth are Henry Francis Keenan's The Money-Makers (1885), Charles Dudley Warner's That Fortune (1899), Garrett P. Serviss's The Moon Metal (1900), David Graham Phillips's The Great God Success (1901), Robert Barr's The Victors (1901), Will Payne's The Money Captain (1898) and On Fortunes Road (1902), H. K. Webster's The Banker and the Bear (1900), Samuel Merwin's The Honey Bee (1901), and Merwin and Webster's Calumet “K” (1901) and The Short Line War (1899), and Harold Frederic's The Lawton Girl (1890) and The Market-Place (1899). And novels which depict the corruptive effect of the new economy, either on the system or on the individual, are Rebecca Harding Davis's John Andross (1874), J. W. De Forest's Honest John Vane (1875), J. G. Holland's Sevenoaks (1875), Edgar Fawcett's An Ambitious Woman (1883), F. Marion Crawford's An American Politician (1885), Thomas Stewart Denison's An Iron Crown (1885), Paul Leicester Ford's The Honorable Peter Stirling (1894), Hamlin Garland's A Spoil of Office (1892), Henry Blake Fuller's The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and With the Procession (1895), and almost all the novels of Robert Herrick, but especially The Gospel of Freedom (1898), The Web of Life (1900), The Real World (1901), The Common Lot (1904), The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905), Together (1908), and One Woman's Life (1913).

The cumulative effect of these novels is more impressive than the individual achievements of most of these authors, almost all of whom have fallen out of the canon. We thus have a literary substratum which belies the supposed indifference of the gilded age to the actual workings of their economic system and the subsequent abuses it produced. As in Zola, we can move in these novels from the boardrooms of power and wealth to the salons where the wealth is displayed, to the legislating halls which the wealth controls, to the mills, factories, and mines that produce the wealth at great human sacrifice and suffering. Although the voice depicting the latter experience is certainly muted, we are still far removed from what Walter Rideout calls the “radical novel.”² American fiction had to go through its own version of literary naturalism before that kind of experience could take place, and the two most influential practitioners of American literary naturalism were Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser.

The connection between Norris and Zola is a direct one. Norris probably did not know Zola's work when he lived in France as a student from 1887 to 1889, but he had certainly discovered Zola by 1890 or shortly afterward when he was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley. Norris's treatment of physical degeneration is the basis for Vandover and the Brute (1914), which he worked on early in his career but which was published posthumously. In McTeague (1899) Norris treats the same theme but counterpoints it against a social backdrop, which includes a consideration of the mine fields of California, the social mix of San Francisco, especially the Polk Street area, and the compulsion for money. The stories of Trina and McTeague, and Maria and Zerkow are studies of greed, of people driven to pathological behavior by the desire for gold and money. Zerkow, compulsively driven by his delusion that Maria possesses a set of golden dishes, will murder her. McTeague will murder Trina for the five thousand dollars in gold pieces that she counts every day and takes to bed with her. And Marcus Schouler will turn on McTeague when he loses Trina—and the five thousand dollars. The desire for money turns love and friendship to murder and hate. Poverty has the same degenerative effect on Trina and McTeague that it has on Gervaise and Coupeau in Zola's L'Assommoir, and it creates in McTeague the same homicidal tendencies that sexual love and passion inculcated in Jacques Lantier in La Bête humaine. The influence of Zola on the early Norris is evident on almost every page.

But Norris was not content simply to depict the pathology of naturalism. By March 1899, in a letter to William Dean Howells, Norris indicates that he had the idea for an “epic trilogy” dealing with wheat—its production (The Octopus), distribution (The Pit), and its consumption (the never-completed The Wolf). Like Zola, Norris wanted to write a series of novels describing the economic forces that were changing modern society from an agrarian to an urban base. He also wanted to work out his idea of the West—his belief that the direction of modern civilization, with some starts and stops, had been moving along a western frontier, jumping the Atlantic after the Crusades, progressing across the American continent, and then jumping the Pacific when the American West was settled. Dewey's exploits at Manila and the landing of United States marines in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 were significant events in the documentation of this thesis.³ His trilogy would begin at the present cutting edge of the frontier (California), move eastward to the commodity markets where wheat was bought and sold speculatively (Chicago), and end where the movement began, where the life-giving wheat was now consumed (Europe). What Norris wanted to show was how modern capitalism had created a world city where economic events thousands of miles removed had life-threatening consequences for markets all over the world. In The Octopus, for example, he describes the telegraph lines that connect the ranchers

by wire with San Francisco, and through that city with Minneapolis, Duluth, Chicago, New York, and at last the most important of all, with Liverpool. Fluctuations in the price of the world's crop during and after harvest thrilled straight through to the office of Los Muertos, to that of the Quien Sabe, to Osterman's and to Broderson's. During a flurry in the Chicago wheat pits in the August of that year … Harran and Magnus had sat up nearly half of one night watching the strip of white tape jerking unsteadily from the reel. At such moments they no longer felt their individuality. The ranch became merely the part of an enormous whole, a unit in the vast agglomeration of wheat land the whole world round, feeling the effects of causes thousands of miles distant—a drought on the prairies of Dakota, a rain on the plains of India, a frost on the Russian steppes, a hot wind on the llanos of the Argentine.

(p. 44; see also pp. 216-17)

The plot for The Octopus (1901) came mainly from a shoot-out in May of 1880 between agents of the Southern Pacific Railroad and wheat farmers of Tulare County in the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley. The railroad had originally encouraged ranchers to settle the land given to it by the government, promising the settlers that the land would be sold to them at a minimal price. Once the land was improved, the railroad raised the price. When the ranchers protested, the railroad sent in deputies to dispossess them. In the fight that followed, seven men—five of them ranchers—were killed. While Norris's sympathy in The Octopus was clearly with the ranchers, he showed how they also had been corrupted by money, how they were exploiting the land for immediate gain, and how they were also leaving a legacy of greed, of bribery and of deceitful influence:

They had no love for their land. They were not attached to the soil. They worked their ranches as a quarter of a century before they had worked their mines. … To get all there was out of the land, to squeeze it dry, to exhaust it, seemed their policy. When at last the land, worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then they would all have made fortunes. They did not care. “After us the deluge.”

(p. 212)

There were no innocents in this economic process—only the working of the wheat, a force which somehow, and this is the vaguest part of Norris's thinking, is working for the Good, an idea the opposite of which the novel better documents (cf. pp. 405, 446, 457-58).

While most of the action in The Octopus takes place in the San Joaquin Valley, San Francisco is an all-pervading presence. There the railroad, the Octopus, has its headquarters, and there Shelgrim (modeled on Collis P. Huntington) lectures Presley on the philosophy of force—a philosophy which absolves the railroad from moral responsibility. The liaison between the ranchers and the city is S. Behrman, the banker and local agent for the railroad, who is most instrumental in dispossessing the ranchers. What used to be a symbiotic relationship between city and countryside has broken down in The Octopus; the city seems to feed off the land—as the sumptuous dinner at the end metaphorically suggests—and deplinishes without ever restoring. Like Zola, Norris depicted in The Octopus a shift in cultural values—a movement away from the land to the city as the source of the new power, the wheat as a force in itself being funneled through the city to markets all over the world.

In his next novel, The Pit (1903), Norris further develops this theme. The central character in The Pit is Curtis Jadwin, who tries to corner the wheat market, and the central situation involves the Chicago Board of Trade, which buys and sells wheat options, thus helping to set the price of wheat worldwide. Norris convincingly shows Chicago as a center into and out of which energy flows—not only the energy embodied in the trains and barges that come into Chicago everyday but the energy behind speculation which binds Chicago to the West and the prairie states where wheat is produced, and to Europe where the surplus will eventually be sold. Chicago was a “force” that “turned the wheels of a harvester and seeder a thousand miles distant in Iowa and Kansas,” the “heart of America,” a force of empire that determined “how much the peasant [in Europe] shall pay for his loaf of bread.”⁴ But as central as Jadwin and Chicago are to Norris's story, the wheat is even a greater force, larger than both. Norris effectively depicts in The Pit a world of limits—the naturalistic belief in a physical, quantitative world—and when Jadwin tries to raise the price of wheat beyond the “limit” that wheat will go (p. 346), the market breaks and he is a ruined man. Every man and every social institution has its limit, and even abstract matters like wheat speculation are governed by laws that ultimately come back to nature—back to the land, back to the wheat, and to the forces out of which life germinates, a theme Norris energetically shared with Zola.

This becomes the infrastructure of Norris's world. The social structure follows as does the superstructure of art and intellectual pursuits. But everything eventually comes back to the wheat and the land, just as all life ends in the grave. Curtis Jadwin's wife, Laura, helps carry this theme. We first see her at the opera, where talk of wheat speculation can be heard competing with the singing. Laura—arrogant, self-concerned, cloying when she is not childishly independent—is torn between two men, Curtis, the man of practical energy, and Sheldon Corthell, the artist, a woman's man, sensitive to life's beauty but passive and effete. Laura's instinct drives her toward Curtis, and although she wavers when Jadwin gives all of his time to his business affairs, she remains faithful to him at the end; Norris hereby gives priority to the world of business over the world of the salon, the man of action over the man of art, of bold venture over esthetic pursuits, perhaps because Jadwin is closer to the workings of wheat as it moves, perpetuates, and transforms life. Norris never finished the third volume of his story about wheat, never got to Europe, where the consumption of wheat would be the final step in this cycle of life. But thematically a third volume was not necessary. Norris had already shown how the growing and selling of wheat touches the lives of everyone, worldwide; and he clearly documented the economic assumption behind literary naturalism.

Norris died in 1902 at the age of thirty-two, too young to leave a literary legacy of his own except for the influence that he had on Theodore Dreiser. Norris was the reader for Doubleday, Page and Company when Dreiser submitted his manuscript of Sister Carrie to this firm, and Norris supported the publication of the novel, even after Doubleday had had a change of mind and wanted to break his contract with Dreiser. Dreiser never forgot Norris's help and friendship; he was equally moved by Norris's literary achievement, especially The Pit, his favorite among Norris's novels. There is no question that The Pit had an influence on two of Dreiser's own novels—The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914).

But despite the influence, The Financier is a very different novel from Norris's The Octopus or The Pit. In Norris's novels, as in Zola's, the emphasis is upon the workings of an economic system and the way individual characters fit into that system. In Dreiser's The Financier, the emphasis is upon the rise and fall and rise again of a young financier genius, Frank Cowperwood (modeled on Charles Yerkes), who makes a fortune in the Philadelphia brokerage business before he is indicted and found guilty of using public funds for speculative purposes. By the end of the novel, Cowperwood is out of prison and making another fortune when the house of Jay Cooke fails. In The Financier, Dreiser puts the emphasis upon the obsessive nature of Cowperwood, who early in life decides to be a money-man, and how the genius for this work is part of his temperament and nature. He also puts the emphasis upon Cowperwood's desire for the good things in life, especially his love for the beautiful, including the beautiful Aileen Butler, whom he pursues with the same intensity that he pursues money. Despite the differences in their lives, Dreiser superimposed upon Cowperwood many of his own personal traits and qualities. Dreiser also conveys in The Financier a sense of a city, Philadelphia, and of America itself coming of age. The story is told against the backdrop of life just after the Civil War when cities were beginning to overarch the land and speculative money was being directed to new enterprises in the West, especially to those involving the railroad. Men of immense wealth like Jay Cooke took advantage of this situation:

After the Civil War this man, who had built up a tremendous banking business in Philadelphia, with great branches in New York and Washington, was at a loss for some time for some significant thing to do, some constructive work that would be worthy of his genius. … The project which fascinated him most was the one that related to the development of the territory then lying almost unexplored between the extreme western shore of Lake Superior, where Duluth now stands, and that portion of the Pacific Ocean into which the Columbia River empties—the extreme northern one-third of the United States. Here, if a railroad were built, would spring up great cities and prosperous towns. … It was a vision of empire, not unlike the Panama Canal project of the same period. … His genius had worked out the sale of great government loans during the Civil War to the people direct. … Why not Northern Pacific certificates? For several years he … [organized] great railway-construction corps, building hundreds of miles of track under the most trying conditions, and selling great blocks of his stock, on which interest of a certain percentage was guaranteed. … However, hard times, the war between France and Germany, which tied up European capital …, all conspired to wreck it. On September 18, 1873, at twelve-fifteen noon, Jay Cooke & Co. failed for approximately eight million dollars and the Northern Pacific for all that had been invested in it—some fifty million dollars more.⁵

Like Norris, Dreiser knew that the system was larger than the individuals who made it up and that it depended upon the subtle workings of events worldwide. When the Franco-Prussian War tied up European capital, Cooke's house failed—just as the Chicago fire of 1871 brought ruin to Cowperwood/Yerkes. In all of these novels, the realm of force operates in terms of laws of its own.

This is specifically the thesis of Dreiser's next novel, The Titan. Here Cowperwood has moved to Chicago where he is successful in establishing a gas trust before he puts into operation a plan to monopolize the streetcar system. Chicago itself embodies an energy that parallels Cowperwood's drive, and the destiny of the city and the man seem inseparable. Cowperwood's desire to have, to possess, is extended to women, and the subplot of this novel involves his affairs with a host of women—Stephanie Platow, Cecily Haguenin, Florence Cochrane, Caroline Hand, and Berenice Fleming. His acquisitiveness in business and in love engenders a swarm of powerful and committed enemies. As he multiplies enemies and angers the citizens of Chicago with his financial schemes, Cowperwood brings into operation a counterforce that finally defeats him. As in Zola's novels, Dreiser's fiction takes place in a world of limits, controlled by what Dreiser called the “equation inevitable.” This is the term Dreiser used to convey his belief in the circularity and repetitiveness of life which stemmed from antagonistic forces canceling each other out. Life ultimately becomes its own justification in this kind of world—all human activity ultimately transient, all men part of an agency that works through them. Both Zola's and Dreiser's characters have moments—artistic moments like those of Claude Lantier and Eugene Witla and Cowperwood himself—when they intuit such secrets, intuit also the beauty of life. For in Zola and Dreiser, beneath the ugliness of an industrial/urban process is a redeeming color and vitality. Unfortunately, those who intuit the beautiful most often fall victim to ideals or illusions, miscalculate the meaning of a mechanistic reality, and perish in disillusionment. Such was the fate of Claude Lantier in L'OEuvre; such is the fate that Cowperwood foresees for Governor Swanson in The Titan; and paradoxically such in some ways was Cowperwood's fate. It is often fatal in naturalistic fiction to dream oneself out of tune with the kingdom of force.

It was such obsession with the theme of force that led other naturalistic writers to move beyond the conventional novel to the subgenre of utopia and dystopia—novels of ideas which depict the kingdom of force, sometimes out of control, a theme that obviously connects these novels with Zola, Norris, and Dreiser. Zola had seen—although not always clearly as we saw in our discussion of Germinal—that the technological/industrial society depended upon efficiency, that efficiency demanded control, and that the instruments of control were one step away from totalitarianism. Zola's mob, like Nathanael West's in The Day of the Locust (1939), reveals the potentiality for anarchy when it is undirected and the potentiality for fascism once it is controlled. The existence of a mass always implies the dangers of master. Edward Bellamy seemed unaware of such political consequences in Looking Backward (1888), a fantasy vision of the year 2000 in which America has given way to a kind of technocracy—a technological society made up of an industrial army in which all the goods that are produced are shared equally among the populace on a kind of pro rata basis. Giving control of this system to an engineer-dictator does not seem to bother Bellamy, who believes that satisfying basic human needs takes priority over other activities and justifies the dangers of a technocracy. Mark Twain was not so sanguine, and he answered Bellamy in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)—as did Ignatius Donnelly in Caesar's Column (1890), both of which try to come to terms with the misdirected consequences of industrial power.

Set in the technological wonders of New York in 1988, Caesar's Column describes another futuristic city. But here the city is torn by political strife stemming from two factions: a wealthy oligarchy that controls the army, and an abused proletariat which gets control of the mob. Once the oligarchy is overthrown, the leaders of the mob consolidate their own power, and the whole process starts over again. As in naturalistic fiction, power and its ability to corrupt remain constant. By the end of the novel, the principal characters have escaped to Uganda in Africa, where they attempt to break the circuitry of power by establishing a kind of socialistic state in which the major sources of wealth are owned in common, the land is shared, gold and silver no longer remain the basis for the value of the dollar, and all forms of interest are outlawed.

Jack London in The Iron Heel (1908) picks up where both Bellamy and Donnelly leave off. He also begins with a capitalistic oligarchy in control of a profits system, protecting their wealth with a police force and army, which are not needed so long as the people give consent to a superstructure of religious and literary ideas that reinforce the status quo. But a discontented labor force brings the crisis to a head, and through a series of revolts (for London, unlike Bellamy, the transformation of wealth from one class to another must involve a violent process) the oligarchy is finally overthrown, but not before the execution of London's revolutionary spokesman, Ernest Everhard. London was not a hundred percent right in his predictions of the future. He was wrong in his Marxist belief that the middle class would be absorbed into the proletariat and that there would be an effective international labor movement. But basing many of his assumptions upon Marx's theory of surplus value, London does predict the fight over world markets, the coming of World Wars I and II, the rise of Japan as an eastern empire, the need for stockpiles and subsidies and the destruction of surplus goods, the buildup of the military, and the rise of trusts and multinational corporations. And behind it all, he insists, is the working of power as a mechanical force in a world of limits—an idea voiced by the capitalist Wickson when he says that the oligarchy will triumph over the revolution: “We will ground your revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces”—because the oligarchy controls the “Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power.”⁶ The novels of Bellamy, Donnelly, and London thus begin where Zola's and Norris's novels end—with the power of a commercial/industrial class out of control and about to be transformed. The utopian writers hence fantasize what is implicit in the naturalistic novel and take it beyond itself to the doorstep of science fiction.⁷

At this point, naturalism plays itself out and gives way to forms of a totalitarian vision or a world-city fantasy; and indeed, its tendentious aspects were carried over and applied to different political, economic, and cultural matters as we moved away from the commercial/industrial city of the nineteenth century to the totalitarian/world city of the twentieth century. Perhaps the last of the pure naturalists in this context was Upton Sinclair, who comes the closest to being an American Zola. Sinclair took on the whole economic process in naturalistic terms and, similar to Zola, wrote novels dealing with speculative finance (The Metropolis and The Moneychangers), the meat, coal, and oil industries (The Jungle, King Coal, and Oil!), and journalism and education (The Brass Check and The Goose-Step). As Zola protested against the fate of Dreyfus, Sinclair protested against the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti (Boston). To be sure, Sinclair never had Zola's dramatic sense, and allowed his novels to become too talky and tendentious (George Orwell once referred to Sinclair as a “dull, empty windbag”); but, like Zola, Sinclair never separated the novel from the world in which he lived, nor from his sense of immediate experience; he also, like Zola, never forgot that such experience flowed from invisible channels of power and control.

Literary naturalism was an important movement in the development of the novel. As a movement it supplanted the sentimental novel and was in turn supplanted by modernism (the literary movement, not the period). Naturalism supplanted the sentimentalism of a Fielding's Squire Allworthy or a Dickens's Mr. Brownlow when it was no longer convincing to have the sentimental hero resolving the major conflicts of the novel through the power of the human heart to do good against the forces of a purely commercial/industrial world. And naturalism itself was supplanted by modernism when the generation of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf rejected the scientific basis of naturalism, turned away from the human detritus of the industrial process, escaped in turn to the world of the salon or into esthetic concerns, and replaced the mechanistic assumptions of naturalism with the more organic elements of symbolism and myth, relying on a human consciousness and a theory of time mainly derived from Henri Bergson. After World War II, literary naturalism was all but dead, perhaps because so many of its assumptions came too close to the racial and genetic theories associated with Hitler and Nazism. Also, after World War II, an industrial society, especially in America, gave way to a service society based upon the processing of information and the need for electronic communication. The nature of labor changed—work did not make money so much as money made money—and the multicorporation and the world city came into being; the world of Zola gave way to that of Thomas Pynchon. But this network of change should not diminish our interest in what naturalism did for the novel, supplying, as I have tried to suggest, the narrative context for studying the historical consequences of the movement from land to city, of the rise of the financial and speculative institutions, of the rise of a factory and industrial system controlled by a privileged few, and of the effects of such a system in human and environmental costs worldwide. In conceptualizing and codifying these ideas and putting them into literary practice, Zola did for the industrial society in literary terms what Marx did in economic and Lenin in political terms. Every naturalistic writer who followed Zola, particularly in America, which was coming into its own industrial era, remained directly or indirectly in his debt.

Notes

1. Walter Fuller Taylor. The Economic Novel in America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1942), p. 25. Taylor bases his statement on statistics derived from Ernest Ludlow Bogart, The Economic History of the United States (New York: Longmans, 1907), pp. 381-82, 400-402.

2. Walter Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956). Rideout's study is a valuable introduction to the social novel at the turn of the century. A related study, also helpful in discussing late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels, is Joseph Blotner's The Modern American Political Novel, 1900-1960 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1966). For a version of literary naturalism in America different from mine see Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1956), and Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1966).

3. Frank Norris, “The Frontier Gone at Last,” The Responsibilities of the Novelist (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1901), pp. 71, 74, 77. Norris restates this thesis in The Octopus (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 227-28. Further references to this novel will be shown parenthetically in the text. There are two studies of Zola's influence on Norris: Marius Biencourt, Une Influence du naturalisme français en Amérique (Paris: Marcel Giard, 1933) and Lars Ahnebrink, “The Influence of Émile Zola on Frank Norris,” Essays and Studies on American Language and Literature (Uppsala, Sweden: A. B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln, 1947).

4. Frank Norris, The Pit (New York: Grove Press, n.d.), pp. 62, 120; cf. also p. 189; further citations to this novel appear in my text.

5. Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (New York: Dell, 1961), pp. 526-28.

6. Jack London, The Iron Heel (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1980), p. 63.

7. For the reader who would like to follow the idea of technological power in science fiction, the following novels are illustrative: Mark Adlard's Interface, Volteface, and Multiface; Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation; Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and The City and the Stars; Samuel R. Delany's The Fall of the Towers and Dhalgren; Jonathan Fast's The Secrets of Synchronicity; Jane Gaskell's A Sweet, Sweet Summer; Mark S. Geston's The Siege of Wonder; Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed; Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad and Solaris (on knowledge and information as power); Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz; Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and Gladiator-at-Law; Mack Reynolds's Black Man's Burden, Boarder, Breed, Nor Birth, The Best Ye Breed, and Mercenary from Tomorrow; Robert Silverberg's A Time of Changes; Clifford D. Simak's City; and Norman Spinard's The Men in the Jungle and The Iron Dream.