Frank Norris

Frank Norris died at thirty-two, of peritonitis following a ruptured appendix, leaving behind a body of work that is both remarkably accomplished and tantalisingly incomplete. Had he lived, he might have become the American Zola he aspired to be — the novelist who documented the entire machinery of American capitalism in fiction of epic scope and naturalistic rigour. As it is, he produced two masterpieces (McTeague and The Octopus), one near-masterpiece (The Pit), and a handful of lesser novels and stories that demonstrate the range of his ambitions even when they fall short of fulfilling them. He was, with Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser, one of the three novelists who brought literary naturalism to America, and his influence on the course of American fiction — from Dreiser through Steinbeck to Cormac McCarthy — has been substantial and enduring.

Paris, San Francisco, and Zola

Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr. was born in 1870 in Chicago, the son of a prosperous wholesale jeweller. The family moved to San Francisco when Norris was fourteen, and he studied art in Paris at the Académie Julian before enrolling at the University of California, Berkeley, and then at Harvard. It was at Berkeley that he discovered Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, the twenty-novel cycle documenting French society under the Second Empire, and conceived the ambition that would drive the rest of his short career: to do for America what Zola had done for France — to write fiction that treated human beings as products of heredity and environment, subject to forces (biological, economic, social) that operated with the impersonality of natural law.

Norris worked as a journalist — he covered the Boer War for Collier’s and the Spanish-American War for McClure’s Magazine — before joining the publishing house of Doubleday, Page & Company, where he served as a reader and championed the publication of Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), an act of editorial generosity that shaped American literary history.

McTeague

McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) was Norris’s first major novel and remains his most powerful. The story of a dim, physically massive San Francisco dentist whose marriage to Trina Sieppe — and Trina’s obsessive miserliness after winning $5,000 in a lottery — leads to domestic violence, murder, and McTeague’s death in the wastes of Death Valley, the novel is a relentless study of how greed and hereditary violence destroy individuals who lack the intellectual resources to resist their own instincts.

The novel’s naturalism is uncompromising. McTeague is not a villain; he is a creature of limited intelligence and powerful appetites, shaped by his environment — the working-class Polk Street neighbourhood, the gold mines where he grew up — and driven by forces he cannot understand or control. Norris depicts his decline with the clinical detachment of a naturalist observing the behaviour of a specimen, yet the novel generates genuine sympathy for its doomed protagonist precisely because of its honesty about the limitations of the human condition.

Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 film adaptation, Greed, is one of the landmarks of silent cinema and testament to the novel’s cinematic power.

The Epic of the Wheat

Norris’s most ambitious project was a planned trilogy, The Epic of the Wheat, intended to trace the production, distribution, and consumption of wheat as a commodity — from the California farms where it was grown, through the Chicago exchanges where it was traded, to the European markets where it was consumed. Only two volumes were completed before his death.

The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) — the “production” novel — depicted the conflict between San Joaquin Valley wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose monopolistic control of transportation and land prices was strangling the farming communities. The novel was based on the Mussel Slough Tragedy of 1880, in which a dispute between settlers and the railroad resulted in a gun battle that killed seven men. Norris transformed this material into an epic of economic determinism: the wheat, the railroad, and the forces of capitalism are depicted as impersonal, irresistible powers that crush individuals regardless of their moral qualities.

The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1903), published posthumously, shifted to the Chicago Board of Trade and told the story of Curtis Jadwin, a speculator who attempts to corner the wheat market. The novel was less successful than The Octopus — Norris’s knowledge of the Chicago trading floor was not as intimate as his knowledge of California agriculture — but its depiction of speculation as a form of addiction and its analysis of the relationship between economic abstraction and human consequence were prescient.

The third volume, The Wolf: A Story of Europe, depicting the consumption of American wheat in a famine-stricken European country, was never written.

Naturalism and Its Discontents

Norris was American naturalism’s most articulate theorist as well as one of its most accomplished practitioners. His critical essays, collected in The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903, posthumous), argued that the novel had a duty to engage with the large economic and social forces shaping American life, and that the naturalist method — objective, documentary, attentive to the material conditions of existence — was the appropriate instrument for this engagement.

His naturalism was never pure, however. The Octopus contains passages of mystical lyricism — the wheat itself is depicted as a cosmic force, an embodiment of natural vitality that transcends the sordid human conflicts over its production — that sit uneasily with the novel’s deterministic premises. This tension between the mechanical and the transcendent, between Zola’s materialism and a residual American romanticism, gives Norris’s best work its distinctive energy and its occasional incoherence.

Collecting Norris

First editions of Norris’s novels are scarce and desirable. McTeague (Doubleday & McClure, 1899) is the primary collecting target, with fine copies commanding substantial prices. The Octopus (Doubleday, Page, 1901) and The Pit (Doubleday, Page, 1903) are also sought. Vandover and the Brute (Doubleday, Page, 1914), published posthumously from an unfinished manuscript that survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, is collected for its literary-historical significance. Norris’s early death and relatively small output make his first editions rarer than those of most authors of comparable stature.