Frank Norris and the Novel of California
"I have great faith in the possibilities of San Francisco and the Pacific Coast as offering a field for fiction," wrote Frank Norris in 1898. "Not the fiction of Bret Harte, however, for the country has long since outgrown the `red shirt' period. The novel of California must be now a novel of city life, and it is that novel I hope some day to write successfully."
Perhaps the quintessential California novelist, Frank Norris died before the twentieth century had found its sea legs. And while his collected works can practically be counted on one's fingers, Norris and his best-known novel, The Octopus, have through the years have managed to maintain a somewhat murky presence in the ouevre of Golden State literature. Deeper excavations of Norris's motives, influences, and technique, however, have been typically limited to those who spend their free time perusing academic papers and journals. That the last biography of Norris appeared in 1932 (Franklin Walker's Frank Norris, A Biography) makes the recent offering, Frank Norris, A Life (from the University of Illinois Press), such an anticipated release for historians and literati alike. The book's authors—professors Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse S. Crisler, of Florida State University and Brigham Young University respectively—"began their research as graduate students in 1971, and have devoted most of their scholarly careers to finding out who Frank Norris really was"—a noble undertaking if there ever was one.
Though Frank Norris never saw middle age or a completely realized modernization of his state and its then largest city, San Francisco, his works that concern its denizens and their struggles to come to grips with metropolitan "urbanity" succeed where many of his literary progeny did not—still generating dialogue and controversy one hundred years down the line.
The New York Times ran this review of McElrath and Crisler's book as well as an excerpt from its first chapter. And some of you might recall this essay entitled "The Geography of Frank Norris" from GGP a few years back.