Frank Norris – författare

This classic literary critique of turn-of-the-century capitalism in the United States reveals Norris's powerful story of an obsessed trader intent on cornering the wheat market and the consequences of his unchecked greed.

An early example of American realism, "McTeague" was considered truly shocking when first published at the turn of the century. This searing portrait of the downfall of a slow-witted dentist and his avaricious wife embodies Frank Norris' powerful insights into conflicting forces of heredity and social conditioning. It is a novel of compelling narrative force, resounding with a sense of life as epic. As Kevin Starr points out in his introduction, "McTeague" continues to be regarded as a central statement of evolutionary awareness in late nineteenth-century America and as representative of the best work of a school of writers that included Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.

Like the tentacles of an octopus, the tracks of the railroad reached out across California, as if to grasp everything of value in the state Based on an actual, bloody dispute between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880, The Octopus is a stunning novel of the waning days of the frontier West. To the tough-minded and self-reliant farmers, the monopolistic, land-grabbing railroad represented everything they despised: consolidation, organization, conformity. But Norris idealizes no one in this epic depiction of the volatile situation, for the farmers themselves ruthlessly exploited the land, and in their hunger for larger holdings they resorted to the same tactics used by the railroad: subversion, coercion and outright violence. In his introduction, Kevin Starr discusses Norris's debt to Zola for the novel's extraordinary sweep, scale and abundance of characters and details.

McTeague (1899) chronicles the demise of a San Francisco couple at the end of the nineteenth century. Inspired by an actual crime that was sensationalized in the San Francisco papers, it tells the story of charlatan dentist McTeague, his wife Trina, and their spiralling descent into moral corruption. Norris is often considered to be the `American Zola', and this is one of the most purely naturalistic American novels of the nineteenth century. With its compelling portrayal of human nature at its most basic level, McTeague is a gripping and passionate tale of greed, degeneration and death. It is also one of the first major works of literature to set in California, and it provided the story for Erich von Stroheim's classic of the silent screen, Greed. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Contexts focuses on the novel's sources and composition. Included are newspaper accounts of a San Francisco murder; a description of Norris' Polk Street neighborhood, which figures prominently in McTeague; an examination of the relationship between the novel and naturalism; and a discussion of the book's genesis, from its origin as a Harvard assignment to Norris's revision of it upon his return to San Francisco. Criticism has been revised to include major recent assessments of the novel. Two seminal pieces from the previous edition have been retained—Ernest Marchand's account of McTeague's 1899 reviews and Donald Pizer's essay on naturalism. Six essays and four stills from Erich von Stroheim's film version of McTeague are new. The new essays are by Don Graham, William E. Cain, Barbara Hochman, James L. Caron, Mary Lawlor, and Donna M. Campbell. A Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography are included.

Posthumously published in 1914, Vandover and the Brute is probably Frank Norris's first complete novel, much of it written when he was a student at Harvard in 1894-1895. The subject matter made it unacceptable to turn-of-the-century taste, and when the book finally did appear one reviewer declared that "it ought to have been issued for private circulation only" (Bookman). The setting of the story is San Francisco in the 1890s. Vandover, fresh out of college and the son of a wealthy owner of slum properties, has dreams of being an artist but lacks the discipline to fulfill them. His seduction of a young woman results in her suicide and the death of his own father. Cheated by false friends of part of his patrimony, Vandover gambles away the rest. Finally, as Warren French writes in Frank Norris, "he becomes a bum reduced to cleaning the offal from the slum houses he once owned. His degeneration has also been marked by attacks of lycanthropy, during which he pads around on all fours, naked, howling like a wolf."Although present-day critics would agree with one of the few favorable early judgments—that "it is a first novel of which any writer might be proud" (Boston Transcript)—Vandover and the Brute has yet to be established in its proper place in American fiction. Warren French's introduction points out that while the novel is usually considered as an early, unrevised example of American naturalism, it needs to be seen now as a principal example of a "decadent" literature that flourished briefly in the United States in the 1890s as the influence of the genteel tradition was collapsing. It presents the portrait of an artistic young man comparable to the portrait of a young matron in Kate Chopin's now much discussed novel The Awakening.