Fiction · 1899
McTeague
A Story of San Francisco
McTeague, an untrained dentist practicing on San Francisco's Polk Street, marries Trina Sieppe just after she wins five thousand dollars in a lottery — and her growing miserliness, stoked by the jealous scheming of his former friend Marcus Schouler, drags them both toward violence that ends in the middle of Death Valley.
Frank Norris published the novel in 1899, drawing on the naturalist fiction of Émile Zola; it later became the basis for Erich von Stroheim's 1924 silent film Greed.
Bibliomancer restores the 1899 text exactly as Norris wrote it.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1870–1902 · Victorian
Frank Norris (1870–1902) was born in Chicago and raised from adolescence in San Francisco, studying painting in Paris before turning to writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard. Influenced by Émile Zola's naturalism, he worked as a journalist and war correspondent — covering the Boer War and, for McClure's, the Spanish-American War in Cuba alongside Stephen Crane — while writing the novels for which he is remembered: McTeague (1899), the story of a San Francisco dentist undone by greed, and The Octopus (1901), an account of California wheat ranchers against the railroad and the first volume of a planned trilogy, The Epic of the Wheat, left unfinished at his death. He died in San Francisco in 1902 of complications following a ruptured appendix, at thirty-two; the trilogy's second volume, The Pit, appeared posthumously in 1903.
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