Born before it closed, Jean Renoir always kept one foot in the 19th c. thanks to the books and paintings he grew up around. The impressionist paintings we are familiar with. So let’s imagine browsing his father’s library shelves to feel the literary anchor that would steady his long voyage in cinema. This includes the trio of writers Renoir famously adapted—Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola. But it includes a couple other figures less often talked about. Altogether these authors gave Renoir several approaches to cinema that he tried out as he sought to express his own moment in history as these novelists had expressed theirs. Far more than sources for adaptation, writers were models of authorship and composition that inspired Renoir and made this auteur, an author himself.