Frank Norris (March 5, 1870 - October 25, 1902) was an American novelist during the Progressive Era, the United States' first important naturalist writer. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A California Story (1901), and The Pit (1903). Although he did not 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 influenced by the event of Darwinism, and Thomas Henry Huxley's philiosophical defense of it. Through many of his novels, notably McTeague, runs a preoccupation with the notion of the civilised 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. Frank Norris was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1870, and moved to San Francisco at the age of fourteen. He later became a member of San Francisco's artistic Bohemian Club, which included such literary notables as Jack London and Ambrose Bierce. He studied painting in Paris for two years, where he was exposed to the naturalist novels of Emile Zola. He attended the University of California, Berkeley between 1890 and 1894 and then spent a (reputedly dissolute) year at Harvard University. 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.
In 1900 Frank Norris married Jeanette Black. They had a child in 1901. Norris died in 1902 of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, leaving his young wife and baby and leaving The Epic of Wheat trilogy unfinished. He was only 32. He is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California.
Norris' McTeague was made into a 1924 film called Greed by director Erich von Stroheim, which is today considered a classic of silent cinema.
Greed (1924)
