Doc Crane

Wealthy stockbroker Lemuel Morewood wants his sons, Billy and Tom, to learn the business and marry Emily Donelson and Frances Berkeley, respectively. Billy, however, is infatuated with Mrs. Bruce Guilford, a leader of the "smart set," while Tom loves boxing. At a dinner for which Lemuel hires Bessie Brayton, an orphan from the West, to entertain, Lemuel responds to Bessie's taunts about being old-fashioned by winning a lot of money gambling with Major Bellamy Didsworth, who tries to swindle Bessie, and leaves with her to spend it.

When Pollyanna is orphaned, she's sent to live with her crotchety Aunt Polly. Pollyanna discovers that many of the people in her aunt's New England hometown are as ill-tempered as her aunt. But Pollyanna's incurable optimism - exemplified by her "glad game", in which she looks for the bright side of every situation - brings a change to the staid old community.

Widower Calvert Paige leaves his baby daughter Johnnie in New York and goes West where he becomes wealthy as a mine owner and newspaperman. Lil Magill, who came to work on his newspaper, becomes infatuated with Paige, as he is with her, and they become lovers. After several years Lil has become a successful author but Paige has tired of her. Their estrangement grows when Lil takes the side of striking miners against him.

The wide-ranging storyline of The Melting Pot takes its characters from the Jewish ghettoes of Russia to the Lower East Side of New York.

Quartus Hembly, a man without a conscience, is the ruler of the town of Copper City, having made himself rich at the expense of his workers. When Donald Keith, a young lawyer, arrives in town, a hidden spring within him is touched after Hembly viciously kicks his dog. Keith refuses to leave town and warns Hembly that he will fight to see that the people get their rights.

At the urging of his wealthy grandfather, Willie O'Donovan is sent to boarding school by his preoccupied parents, neither of whom shows much interest in the lad. At school, where he falls in love with Mary, a country girl, Willie hears that his grandfather has died and left him $50,000,000 to be managed by whomever Willie is living with on his eighteenth birthday. Mr. and Mrs. O'Donovan, who are in the midst of divorce, both hire private detectives to bring Willie back to them, but after a series of close calls, Willie manages to avoid the detectives and take refuge at the home of Mary's mother.

For Nita Valyez, who is half-Spanish and half-Irish, Carlos represents potential violence and danger, two things to which she is both attracted and repelled. In contrast, she has only a passing interest in Big Jim, the town's honest, good-hearted sheriff. Then, after Carlos kills a faro dealer, he forces Nita to make an escape with him.