Norris, Frank (Benjamin Franklin Norris)

Norris, Frank (Benjamin Franklin Norris) (1870–1902), was born in Chicago, but in 1884 moved to San Francisco with his parents. After a year in a California preparatory school, he was sent to study art in Paris, where he spent his spare time writing medieval romances. While at the University of California (1890–94), he wrote short stories and sketches for student and local publications, as well as a romantic poem in three cantos, Yvernelle, A Tale of Feudal France (1892). Under the influence of Zola's fiction, he soon turned from his juvenile romanticism to naturalism and began a novel of lower‐ and middle‐class life in San Francisco, which he later completed as McTeague (1899). He next spent a year at Harvard, where he wrote more of McTeague and parts of Vandover and the Brute (1914).

In 1895–96 he was in South Africa, but failed in his project of writing travel sketches because of fighting between the English and Boers, which he reported for Collier's and the San Francisco Chronicle. He was ordered to leave the country, after being captured by the Boers, and returned to join the staff of The Wave, a San Francisco magazine, in which he serialized Moran of the Lady Letty (1898). From his many contributions to this periodical also came the novelette The Joyous Miracle (1906) and two collections of short stories, A Deal in Wheat (1903) and The Third Circle (1909). These works exhibit his divided loyalty to the currently popular romantic realism of Kipling and the naturalistic attitude of Zola. The former influence caused him, like Stephen Crane, to go to Cuba (1898), where he reported the Santiago campaign of the Spanish‐American War for McClure's Magazine. Upon his return (1899), he was employed by the publishing firm of Doubleday, Page, which that year issued McTeague and Blix, a semi‐autobiographical love story. A Man's Woman (1900) is a romantic work in the vein of Jack London's novels.

About this time, moved by his growing concern with social and economic forces, Norris conceived the plan of his “Epic of the Wheat,” a trilogy to consist of The Octopus, a novel dealing with the raising of wheat in California, and the struggle of the ranchers against the railroad; The Pit, a tale of speculation in the Chicago wheat exchange; and The Wolf, about the consumption of the wheat as bread in a famine‐stricken European village. He visited a wheat ranch in California and wrote The Octopus (1901), which is considered his finest work. Before his sudden death following an appendix operation, he had written The Pit (1903), which became extremely popular. The Wolf was left unwritten.

The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903), a collection of essays and articles, contains a statement of his artistic credo, in which he says that the novelist “of all men cannot think only of himself or for himself,” but must rather sacrifice money, fashion, and popularity for the greater reward of realizing that he has told the truth. The best type of novel, according to Norris, “proves something, draws conclusions from a whole congeries of forces, social tendencies, race impulses, devotes itself not to a study of men but of man.” In McTeague and The Octopus, despite their romantic elements and occasional extravagances, he is considered to have achieved his idealistic purpose and to have presented a vivid, authentic portrayal of contemporary life in California. Other posthumous publications include Vandover and the Brute, printed in 1914 from the uncorrected draft of his second novel; Frank Norris of The Wave (1931), a selection of his magazine fiction; and Works (10 vols., 1928), containing other previously uncollected articles and stories, with introductions by leading authors, including his brother Charles Norris. His Letters were first collected in 1956 and in a greatly enlarged edition in 1986.