American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. It had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America's literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. Representatives include Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, etc.