Frank Norris

Frank Norris (1870-1902), American novelist, born in Chicago, and educated at the University of California and Harvard University. He was a newspaper correspondent during the Spanish-American War (1898) and the Boer War (1899-1902). Norris's novels, influenced by the French naturalistic novelist Émile Zola, are brutally realistic, describing and analyzing sordid human motives and environments. Norris's most important works are McTeague (1899), a powerful story of the tragedy caused by greed in the lives of ordinary people; an uncompleted trilogy, “The Epic of Wheat,” which depicts the human dramas arising from the raising, selling, and consumption of wheat, and of which two novels, The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903), were written; and Vandover and the Brute (1914), a story of degeneration. Other novels include Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), A Man's Woman (1900), and Blix (1900). His criticism includes the collection The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays (1903). A volume of Norris's letters was published in 1956.