By “naturalism” in my title, I mean American fiction of the 1890s and 1930s that was committed to the depiction of hardship, poverty, and other forms of deprivation and of the inability both of the individual and of society to overcome these conditions. By “visual arts” I mean both the graphic arts of painting and various kinds of drawing and the more recently developed art of photography. I will devote my attention to two ways in which the visual arts and naturalistic expression are interrelated during the 1890s and 1930s. The first stems from the immersion of both visual artists and writers in a similar social and artistic milieu, one which encouraged expression to take roughly parallel form and shape in both areas of expression. The second concerns a more specific act of borrowing from a visual form by a writer. I will initially discuss the impact of an 1890s school of New York urban realism in photography and the graphic arts on Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and the relationship of Stephen Crane's writing to photography and impressionism. I will then examine the influence of 1930s documentary photography on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

Almost all of these instances of a naturalist writer's indebtedness to a visual art form confirm the truism that naturalists usually viewed themselves as playing a mediating role between social reality and need on the one hand and the reader on the other. There is a social condition—for example, the slums or migrant exploitation—and the naturalist writer seeking to represent it is almost inevitably drawn to parallel efforts by visual artists. The specific instances of this attraction in the three writers I examine, however, should also demonstrate that the truism is useful only as far as it goes, which is not very far at all in comparison to the richness and variability of the specific instance. Indeed, a realization of the full dimensions of these instances should cast far more light on each individual writer's distinctive qualities of mind and art than that provided by the commonplace about a naturalist's preference for visual arts with a social realism bias.

Theodore Dreiser

Ellen Moers once noted that Dreiser's lengthy article “Curious Shifts of the Poor,” published in November 1899, can scarcely be separated from his “first contribution to the literature of realism, Sister Carrie” (57).