Novel writing appeared as a whole new activity in the late Qajar (from the 1870s onwards) in Iran. The Dreadful Tehran/Tihran-i Makhuf (written by Morteza MushfiqKazemi), the first popular novel with a social theme, was published in 1922 and inspired a trend of social melodramas in Iranian literature. Since its beginning, like any other modern phenomena, novels raised many mixed reactions in Iran’s cultural milieu. The main reason for such reactions was the presence of a serious rival for Iranian novels at birth; French novels. Before that time, the Iranian society was acquainted with the phenomenon of the novel in the late Qajar period, mainly through Persian translations from works of French writers such as Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Eugene Sue. The popularity of these translations in Iran’s book market made the situation difficult for native writers of Reza Shah’s era. The novels of Iranian writers were compared with the existing French novels, and the intellectuals and literary critics of Iran accused the Iranian novelists of imitating French samples and not being able to create an original work, representing the problems of their own society. However, the writers of the first Iranian popular social novels (M. M. Kazemi, Mohammad Hejazi, Abbas Khalili) were highly engaged with issues related to western modernity and its manifestations (dealing with the dark sides of the urban life, adopting new technologies, redefining the role of the women in the society, etc.) and their novels could be considered as one of the best frames for investigating the early critical debates on modernity in Iran. Based on these considerations, the present study intends to investigate the rise of social novels in Iran from a sociological/Symbolic Anthropological perspective. The most crucial questions are: what themes and approaches did those popular novels embody in those tumultuous eras in Iran's political life? Were these novels meant to function as an escape from the harsh reality and status quo? Do these novels provide appropriate and reliable tools for understanding Iranian society of that era?