Frank Norris

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.