The Octopus (Frank Norris)
...Octopus (1901), and the memorable McTeague (1899). Of the writers who assembled in San Francisco's Bohemian Club along with Joaquin Miller and Jack London, young Norris was one of the most energetic, filled with ideas.
Like many of his contemporaries, he was profoundly influenced by the advent of Darwinism, and Thomas Henry Huxley's philosophical defense of it. Norris was particularly influenced by an optimistic strand of Darwinist philosophy taught by Joseph LeConte, whom Norris studied under while at UC-Berkeley. Through many of his novels, notably McTeague, runs a preoccupation with the notion of the civilized 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 and the French naturalist Emile Zola.
Frank Norris rests eternally in the deep shade of four Irish yew trees. His elegant monument, dedicated by his fraternity brothers братские отношения at the University of California, is an eight-foot tablet in the Arts and Crafts style. It bears his writer's name, Frank, rather than his given name of Benjamin Franklin Norris, and is embellished украшать with three blades of wheat, in tribute to his epic novel, "The Octopus," about wheat farming in the San Joaquin Valley. Roman numerals (MDCCCLXX-MCMII) blunt the awful fact that this prolific, nationally recognized writer died at the age of 32.
Frank Norris, novelist and critic, was one of the progressive writers of his time whose works dealt with social problems and won the attention of the reading public. His critical articles on literature and style did much to turn young writers towards realism.
Born in Chicago in 1870 in the family of a rich jeweller, Norris was able to get a good education. When Frank was still a boy, his father moved to California where he became a...
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