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 South African and the Spanish-American wars. Norris's novels, influenced by the French naturalistic novelist Émile Zola, are brutally realistic, describing and analysing sordid human motives and environments. The most important are McTeague (1899), a powerful story of the tragedy caused by greed in the lives of ordinary people; a trilogy, “The Epic of Wheat”, depicting the human dramas arising from the raising, selling, and consumption of wheat, 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). A volume of Norris's letters was published in 1956.