The Heart of the Blue Ridge is a novel published in 1915 by Dyckman Waldron Baily, who was a businessman and author in North Carolina. It was adapted into a silent film the same year. [1] [2] [3] The film was directed by James Young and starred his wife Clara Kimball Young and Chester Barnett. Robert W. Cummings and Edwin L. Hollywood were also cast in the film. The film was reissued in 1917 as The Savage Instinct. [4]
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, normally written in prose form, and which is typically published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the Italian novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". Walter Scott made a distinction between the novel, in which "events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society" and the romance, which he defined as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents". However, many such romances, including the historical romances of Scott, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, are also frequently called novels, and Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". This sort of romance is in turn different from the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, en roman." Most European languages use the word "romance" for extended narratives.
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound. In silent films for entertainment, the plot may be conveyed by the use of title cards, written indications of the plot and key dialogue lines. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, the introduction of synchronized dialogue became practical only in the late 1920s with the perfection of the Audion amplifier tube and the advent of the Vitaphone system.
James Young was an American film director, actor and screenwriter of the silent era. Before films Young had a successful career as a stage actor appearing on Broadway and throughout the country, and was the author of a notable 1905 book on theatrical makeup. His first wife was librettist Rida Johnson Young who often composed with Victor Herbert. Turning to silent films he directed 93 films between 1912 and 1928. He also appeared as an actor in 62 films between 1909 and 1917.
