Fiction · 1901
The Octopus
A Story of California
The Octopus follows the wheat ranchers of California's San Joaquin Valley as they're squeezed by the railroad that both carries their crop to market and, through rigged freight rates and disputed land titles, is slowly taking the land itself — a conflict that builds toward the historic Mussel Slough shootout, restaged here as fiction, between armed ranchers and the railroad's deputies. Around that central fight, Frank Norris follows a dozen lives caught in it: the poet Presley trying to write an epic of the West he's watching die, the rancher Magnus Derrick gambling everything on a fight he can't win, and the wheat itself, indifferent to any of them, moving toward the world regardless.
Frank Norris published The Octopus in 1901, the first volume of a planned trilogy — "the Epic of the Wheat" — that he did not live to finish; he died the following year at thirty-two, having completed only the second volume, The Pit.
Bibliomancer publishes the 1901 text exactly as Frank 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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