Stephen French Whitman is an over­looked American literary naturalist whose Predestined compares favorably with the work of Frank Norris. In a letter to the late Charles Scribner in 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald proposed that the firm establish a Scribner Library. In a list of eighteen books, Fitzgerald ranked Predestined second after The House of Mirth or Ethan Frome. His own This Side of Paradise was third. In the dozen years since its first pub­lication in 1910, Predestined had stirred excitement among a considerable number of other writers and journalists. Whit­man, Princeton class of 1901, had worked for several years on the New York Sun. Predestined, Whitman’s first and most successful novel, is a remarkably con­trolled, inexorably plotted story of Felix Piers, born to wealth and misfortune, who was predestined to a life of failure. The rich, varied background of New York City’s many sides provides the compelling backdrop to this deterministic novel.