San Francisco County CA Archives Biographies.....Norris, Frank March 5, 1870 - October 25, 1902
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Ila Wakley iwakley@msn.com October 30, 2010, 4:35 pm

Source: California and Californians, Vol. IV, Published 1932, Pages  100 - 101
Author: The Lewis Publishing Company

     FRANK NORRIS. "I don't want to write literature," said Frank Norris at 
the outset of his career. "I want to write life!"

     He did both. He saw life clearly and wrote of it as it is, with a 
realistic power that has seldom been equaled in American literature. His work 
is broad in conception, thorough in execution and elemental in appeal.

     Benjamin Franklin Norris, to use his unfamiliar full name, was born in 
Chicago, March 5, 1870. While he was a boy his parents moved to California, 
and it is this state more than any other locale that he used as a background 
for his stories. At seventeen, intending to become an artist, he went to Paris 
and enrolled in the Atelier Julien. He spent two years there and then returned 
to California to prepare for the entrance examinations of the University of 
California. He graduated in 1894, and afterwards devoted one year to 
postgraduate work at Harvard.

     Ancient Armour, a short article he had written in Paris, was published in 
a San Francisco paper during his student days at Berkeley. During his last 
semester a series of his stories appeared in the Overland Monthly, and the 
Argonaut published a few short stories from his pen. Yberville, a romance of 
Spanish life in old California, came out in 1891.

     While in France he had come under the influence of Zola, the great 
realist. As a result of that influence, while he was still an undergraduate in 
the university, Norris began McTeague, his powerful story of the San Francisco 
slums.

     In 1896 and 1897 Frank Norris contributed many unusual short stories to 
the San Francisco Wave, which was then a struggling weekly edited by John 
O'Hara Cosgrave.

     Norris had served as war correspondent in South Africa for the San 
Francisco Chronicle at the time of the Jamestown raid, and in 1898 went to 
Cuba for McClure's Magazine.

     After the publication of McTeague other books appeared. His great work, 
however, was the famous trilogy, "an epic of the wheat," only two volumes of 
which were completed — The Octopus and The Pit. The third volume of the 
trilogy, planned but never written, was to be called The Wolf and was to 
depict the struggle for the wheat in famine stricken Europe. No other American 
novelist has conceived a work of such epic proportions. If Norris had lived to 
complete the trilogy, it would, perhaps, have been the closest approach to 
that almost mythical thing, the great American novel.

     Just before his death Frank Norris was serving as literary adviser to 
Doubleday, Page & Co. He came back to California, intending to write The Wolf. 
But after a brief illness he died in San Francisco, October 25, 1902, at the 
age of thirty-two.

     McTeague is a unique contribution to American literature; the epic of the 
wheat, even unfinished, is an enduring conception. Though he died young, at an 
age when most men are only beginning their careers, Frank Norris belongs among 
the few great American novelists. His life was one of fine devotion to the 
highest artistic and literary ideals. As he himself said, he never truckled; 
he never took off the hat to fashion and held it out for pennies. Instead, he 
told the truth, as a result his work will live.—By Eric Howard.

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