Frank Norris

For more information on Benjamin Franklin Norris, visit Britannica.com.

The best work of Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. (1870-1902), American novelist and critic, achieves a raw force that has won him an important place in the history of American fiction.

Frank Norris was born in Chicago on Mar. 5, 1870, the son of a wealthy jeweler. When Frank was 14, the family moved into a mansion in San Francisco. This house would be the model for the mansion in Norris's novel The Pit (1903), which also presents a portrait of his mother in the character of Laura.

Education and Early Writings

After a short time in high school, Norris left to study at the San Francisco Art Association. His family, even his no-nonsense father, encouraged him; in fact, they moved to London and then to Paris in 1887 so that he could study painting. Norris enjoyed painting, but after 2 years he returned to San Francisco and in 1890 entered the University of California. He remained for 4 years but did not take a degree. Meanwhile, his mother published his first book: Yvernelle: A Tale of Feudal France (1892), a verse romance.

In 1894 Norris's parents were divorced. His father continued to provide for the family financially. Frank, his mother, and his brother, Charles, soon traveled east, and Frank enrolled at Harvard in the creative writing class of Lewis Gates. Later, in a critical essay, Norris stated a conviction he had acquired from Gates: "The construction of a novel is as much of an exact science as the construction of a temple or a sonnet." He also learned that it is best for the novelist "to treat but one thing in one chapter, to keep to one time and one place as much as is possible, and to hold to but one theme from cover to cover." Literary critics are divided in assessing how closely Norris actually followed these precepts in his best novels, but another of Gates's lessons - the insistence that fiction plainly state the "facts of daily life" - is unquestionably reflected in Norris's finest work. Under Gates, Norris began work on McTeague and Vandover and the Brute, two novels many critics consider his most successful.

Journalist and Critic

After a year at Harvard, Norris traveled to Africa to gather material for fiction and to write newspaper stories for the San Francisco Chronicle. However, victimized by a tropical fever and in trouble with the Boer authorities in southern Africa, he returned to San Francisco. There, on the magazine staff of the Wave (1896-1898), he contributed over 200 pieces: articles on football; reviews of books, plays, and stories; and a serialized novel. His book reviews reveal his deep appreciation of the pioneering naturalist in French fiction, Émile Zola, whose novels gave Norris "an impression of immensity, of vast, illimitable force, of a breadth of view and an enormity of imagination almost too great to be realized." Though Norris also praised America's leading realist writer, William Dean Howells, he clearly preferred Zola's scope and power and sought the same in his own work.

Meanwhile, Norris led a bohemian life among San Francisco artists and writers. In 1896 he finished McTeague. He soon met Jeanette Black, then 17; their courtship became the subject of Blix, the lightest, most romantic, and trivial of Norris's novels, but not the worst. The self-portrait contained in the chief character, Conde Rivers, is probably very revealing.

In 1898 Norris moved to New York City. He started working for McClure's Magazine but soon went off to cover the Spanish-American War. This venture was a fiasco, and his reports were not published. He succeeded in meeting two important literary men - Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane - but the former, whom he had long admired, proved unapproachable thereafter, and the latter's personal conduct repelled Norris. Finally, Norris contracted malaria and returned to San Francisco.

His Novels

The early novels were McTeague and Vandover and the Brute. (Norris never completed Vandover; it was prepared for posthumous publication in 1914 by his brother, Charles, himself a novelist.) Vandover concerns a San Francisco artist who lets the brute in his nature dominate his actions, slipping steadily from ease to squalor. The novel is confused, but Moran of the Lady Letty, the story Norris serialized in the Wave in 1898, is even more so. Though this story was a piece of unredeemable brutality, it had won Norris the job at McClure's. Meanwhile, a friend introduced Norris to the influential William Dean Howells, who read McTeague and encouraged Norris to continue seeking a publisher. The novel finally appeared in 1899.

McTeague is flawed by Norris's inability to write convincing dialogue, but another of Norris's weaknesses became a positive strength in this novel. Norris could not create characters who behave rationally; his people are never fully developed human beings. But this is the philosophic point in McTeague, which concerns characters who are incapable of reasonable behavior. In physical strength McTeague is almost superhuman, but in self-understanding and self-control he is less than half a man. McTeague's wife is equally shallow, and her only emotion is greed. Both characters are impelled toward catastrophe by hidden forces; they are objects, not actors, in the human drama. Yet their story is dramatic and vivid: in 1924 Erich von Stroheim demonstrated how much drama the story contains when he adapted it into his silent-screen classic Greed.

Blix was published just after McTeague. Norris then returned to California to gather new material and to marry Jeanette Black in 1900. The couple settled in New York City, where Norris continued working on his fiction and served as a reader for Doubleday, Page, and Company. In the latter capacity he recommended the publication of Sister Carrie, a novel by an unknown writer, Theodore Dreiser which, today, is considered by some to be an American classic. Doubleday contracted to publish it but later attempted to break the contract, and, failing in that, published the book without trying to sell it. Dreiser realized $68.40 from the transaction.

The hero of Norris's The Octopus (1901) is a poet who identifies himself with the struggling wheat farmers of California against the octopus-tentacled Southern Pacific Railroad. His efforts to help the farmers go as far as bombing a railroad building, but nothing he or anyone else does can correct the injustice and brutality of the situation. The poet finally concludes that economic laws which men cannot alter determine the conditions under which they must live. Although the novel rises to power at moments, it is a strident, grandiose work, simplistic in its interpretation of human motivations. Norris planned it as the first of a trilogy called "The Epic of the Wheat"; the second novel takes its name, The Pit, from the Chicago grain exchange. It focuses on a self-made capitalist, his wife, and an artistic dilettante.

The scale of the action is smaller than in The Octopus, but the characters are much more convincing, probably because Norris was now writing of the economic class in which he had grown up. The Octopus could be called a bad major novel, The Pit a good minor one.

In 1902, shortly after the birth of their only child, a daughter, the Norrises moved to San Francisco. They planned a world cruise during which Norris would gather material for the third volume of his trilogy. However, Norris neglected an abdominal pain that proved to be appendicitis, and he died on Oct. 25, 1902. The Pit, serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, appeared as a book in 1903, the same year that saw the publication of A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories and a collection of his critical essays, The Responsibilities of a Novelist.

Further Reading

A reliable biography of Norris is Franklin Walker, Frank Norris (1932). Warren French, Frank Norris (1962), provides a biographical sketch and an analysis of his works. Donald Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris (1966), is thorough and scholarly, and his edition of The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris (1964) presents valuable material not available elsewhere. There are excellent sections on Norris in Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism (1965), and Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s (1966).

Additional Sources

Norris, Charles Gilman, Frank Norris, 1870-1902: an intimate sketch of the man who was universally acclaimed the greatest American writer of his generation, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.

Quotes:

"Truth is a thing immortal and perpetual, and it gives to us a beauty that fades not away in time."

For other persons of the same name, see Norris.

Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr.
Born	March 5, 1870(1870-03-05) Chicago, Illinois, United States
Died	October 25, 1902 (aged 32) San Francisco, California
Pen name	Frank Norris
Occupation	Novelist, Writer
Nationality	American
Notable work(s)	The Epic of Wheat (unfinished)

Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. (March 5, 1870 – October 25, 1902) was an American novelist, during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A California Story (1901), and The Pit (1903).

Contents 1 Life 2 Career 3 Legacy 4 Bibliography 5 References 5.1 Further reading 6 External links

Life

Frank Norris was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1870. His father, Benjamin, was a self-made Chicago businessman and his mother, Gertrude, had a stage career. In 1884 the family moved to San Francisco where Benjamin went into real estate. In 1887 after the death of his brother and brief and unsuccessful stay in London young Norris went to Académie Julian in Paris where he studied painting for two years and was exposed to the naturalist novels of Emile Zola. He attended the University of California, Berkeley between 1890 and 1894 where he picked up the ideas of human evolution of Darwin and Spencer, that are reflected in his future writings. His stories appeared in the undergraduate magazine at Berkeley and in the San Francisco Wave. After his parents' divorce he went east and spent a year at the English Department of Harvard University. There he came under influence of Lewis E. Gates who encouraged his writing. He worked as a news correspondent in South Africa in 1895–96, and then an editorial assistant on the San Francisco Wave (1896–97). He worked for McClure's Magazine as a war correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish-American war in 1898. He joined the New York City publishing firm of Doubleday & Page in 1899.

During his time at the University of California, Berkeley Norris was a brother in the Fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta and was an originator of the Skull & Keys society. Because of his involvement with a prank during the Class Day Exercises in 1893 the annual alumni dinner held by each Phi Gamma Delta chapter still bears his name.^[1] In 1900 Frank Norris married Jeanette Black. They had a child in 1901. Norris died on October 25, 1902 of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix in San Francisco.^[2] This left The Epic of Wheat trilogy unfinished. He was only 32. He is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.

Charles Gilman Norris, the author's younger brother, became a well regarded novelist and editor. C.G. Norris was also the husband of the prolific novelist Kathleen Norris. The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley houses the archives of all three writers.

Career

Norris's work often includes depictions of suffering caused by corrupt and greedy turn-of-the-century corporate monopolies. In The Octopus: A California Story, the Pacific and Southwest Railroad is implicated in the suffering and deaths of a number of ranchers in Southern California. At the end of the novel, after a bloody shootout between farmers and railroad agents at one of the ranches (named Los Muertos), readers are encouraged to take a "larger view" that sees that "through the welter of blood at the irrigating ditch, [...] the great harvest of Los Muertos rolled like a flood from the Sierras to the Himalayas to feed thousands of starving scarecrows on the barren plains of India." Though free-wheeling market capitalism causes the deaths of many of the characters in the novel, this "larger view always [...] discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good." Vandover and the Brute, written in the 1890s, but not published until after his death, is about three college friends, on their way to success, and the ruin of one through a degenerate lifestyle.

Although he did not openly support socialism as a political system, his work nevertheless evinces a socialist mentality and influenced socialist/progressive writers such as Upton Sinclair. Like many of his contemporaries, he was profoundly affected by the advent of Darwinism, and Thomas Henry Huxley's philosophical defense of it. Norris was particularly influenced by an optimistic strand of Darwinist philosophy taught by Joseph LeConte, whom Norris studied under while at the University of California, Berkeley. Through many of his novels, notably McTeague, runs a preoccupation with the notion of the civilized man overcoming the inner "brute," his animalistic tendencies. His peculiar, and often confused, brand of Social Darwinism also bears the influence of the early criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the French naturalist Emile Zola.

Legacy

Norris's short story A Deal in Wheat (1903) and the novel The Pit were the basis for the 1909 D.W. Griffith film A Corner in Wheat. Norris' McTeague has been filmed repeatedly, most famously as a 1924 film called Greed by director Erich von Stroheim.^[3] An opera by William Bolcom, based loosely on this 1899 novel, was premiered by Chicago's Lyric Opera in 1992. The work is in two acts, with libretto by Arnold Weinstein and Robert Altman. The Lyric Opera's presentation featured Ben Heppner in the title role and Catherine Malfitano as Trina, the dentist's wife.

In 2008, The Library of America selected Norris's newspaper article "Hunting Human Game" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.

Bibliography

• Moran of the "Lady Letty": A Story of Adventure Off the California Coast (1898)
• McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899)
• A Man's Woman (1900)
• A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories of the New and Old West
• The Octopus: A Story of California (1901)
• The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1902)
• Vandover and the Brute (1914)

References

1. ^ http://www.phigam.org/history/Songs/PigDinnerOrigins.htm
2. ^ "Death of Frank Norris". New York Times. October 26, 1902. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F03E2DC1E3DEE32A25755C2A9669D946397D6CF. Retrieved 2008-06-27. "Frank Norris, the novelist, died to-day as the result of an operation for appendicitis performed three days ago." 
3. ^ Greed (1924) at the Internet Movie Database

Further reading

• Hochman, Barbara. The Art of Frank Norris, Storyteller University of Missouri Press (1988) ISBN 0-8262-0663-8
• McElrath, Joseph R., Jr. and Crisler, Jesse S. Frank Norris: A Life, University of Illinois Press (2006) ISBN 0-252-03016-8 (the definitive biography of Norris)

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Frank Norris

• Works by Frank Norris at Internet Archive (scanned books original editions)
• Works by Frank Norris at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Frank Norris Page at the William Dean Howells Society; includes links to works on the web, bibliography, index to Frank Norris Studies
• Frank Norris' Gravesite

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