Frank Norris

(1870 - 1902)

Born in Chicago, Frank Norris attended the University of California and Harvard and dabbled in a few careers before deciding to become a novelist. He is grouped with naturalist writers such as Stephen Crane, who, like Norris, was a correspondent in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Norris is best known for his novels McTeague, The Octopus, and The Pit. “He of all men,” he wrote of the novelist, “cannot think only of himself or for himself. And when the last page is written and the ink crusts on the pen point and the hungry presses go clashing after another writer, the ‘new man’ and the new fashion of the hour, he will think of the grim long grind of the years of his life that he has put behind him and of his work that he has built up volume by volume, sincere work, telling the truth as he saw it, independent of fashion and the gallery gods.”