Frank Norris

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Frank Norris
Frank Norris
Frank Norris childhood home in San Francisco until 1894

Frank Norris , actually Benjamin Franklin Norris (born March 5, 1870 in Chicago , Illinois , † October 25, 1902 in San Francisco , California ) was an American writer . His most important works are McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901).

Youth and student days

The father, Benjamin Norris, was born with a hip problem that made him lame. He trained with a watchmaker and then traveled the country as a watch salesman and mechanic until he was finally able to open his own business in Chicago. His mother. Gertrude born Doggett, was a public school teacher before marriage and had notable success as a stage actress. Of their five children, only Frank and his nine years younger brother Charles survived childhood.

When Frank was 14 years old, the family moved to the warmer climate of California because of his father's hip problem. In San Francisco he attended a private school in Belmont. His mother encouraged his artistic talent and in 1886 he took a drawing and painting course at the San Francisco Art Association. From 1887 to 1889 his family accompanied him via London to Paris, where, following his talent for drawing, he began to study art in the Julien studio in Paris . Finally he came to the realization that painting was not his future and that he would rather turn to literature.

From 1890 to 1894 Norris studied literature at the University of California, Berkeley , which he left without a degree because he failed in mathematics. During these years he also explored the nightlife of San Francisco extensively. At university he was fascinated by the lectures of the zoologist Joseph LeConte , who wanted to reconcile the evolution of man from his brutal animal nature with Christian values, ie the slow division of life into many different types through adaptation ( Darwinism ).

After his parents' divorce in 1894, he enrolled at Harvard University ; his mother moved close to Cambridge. He took the literary composition course with Lewis E. Gates, who recommended him to read the works of Émile Zola and French naturalism . During this time he also sketched first drafts for McTeague and Vandover and the Brute .

Norris was one of the writers who met at San Francisco's Bohemian Club, which an employee of the San Francisco Chronicle founded. He also belonged to a small group of artists and bohemians who called themselves "Les Jeunes" and came from the middle and upper classes of San Francisco.

As a journalist and writer

Norris went back to San Francisco and traveled to South Africa for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1896 to report on the situation there. He got caught in the Jameson Raid in Johannesburg and was held in prison for several weeks. While in custody, Norris contracted tropical fever and was later expelled from the country.

Back in California , he wrote literary articles for The Wave magazine . Under the name "The Del Monte Wave" the magazine was founded by Ben C. Truman in 1888 to advertise the newly built "Del Monte Hotel" on the Southern Pacific Railroad in Monterey. In the meantime, John O'Hara Cosgrave owned and edited the magazine, and he promoted Norris by publishing many of Norris' short stories from 1896–98. In 1898 Norris' first novel "Moran of the Lady Letty" was published in four episodes from January to April in "The Wave". Cosgrave took over Everybody's Magazine in 1900 and remained devoted to Norris.

After two years with Wave, Norris, the young bon vivant, had grown tired of continuing to be one of those “dudes” who attended elegant Pacific Heights dinner parties that he would later deride in his novels. He took leave and in 1897 visited the "Big Dipper Mine" near Colfax, a gold digger camp in the Sierras, to collect material for the completion of McTeague, his fairy tale of gold and greed. The camp manager was a brother from the fraternity, whom he later described in the person of Annixter in his novel "Octopus".

In 1898 he received a letter from John S. Phillips, a member of the Doubleday & McClure Company publishing house in New York, who had read his series of "Moran" and invited him to New York City . Phillips also hired him as an incoming manuscript reader at Doubleday. In this role he recommended Theodore Dreiser's first work “Sister Carrie” for publication. The "McClure's Magazine" published his story "Miracle Joyeux" in December 1898 and "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" in March 1899

In 1899, Norris traveled to Cuba as a war correspondent on the Spanish-American War for “McClure's Magazine” and suffered another attack of malaria there.

After "Moran and the Lady Letty", Doubleday released "Blix", "A Man's Woman" and finally McTeague in quick succession . Now Norris was able to work on his “Epic of Wheat”, a trilogy on the American theme of wheat (“The Octopus”, “The Pit”). Before completing the third part, "Wolf", Norris died in 1902 of the effects of a ruptured appendix and peritonitis , which had been complicated by a new attack of tropical fever.

The novels and stories

Moran of the Lady Letty

Moran of the Lady Letty (Copyright 1899 by Doubleday & McClure) The rich young Ramon Laredo is kidnapped and has to work on a ship of unscrupulous smugglers. You meet the sinking "Lady Letty" and can save some members of the team. Among the survivors is Letty 'Moran' Sternerson, the spirited daughter of the captain of the "Letty". Moran and Ramon really don't like each other. However, when his evil captain Jack Kitchell keeps an eye on her, Ramon becomes her savior. Norris read a few chapters of his novel “Moran” to Captain Joseph Hodgson, who worked in Presidio at the United States Life Saving Station and was a great help to him with nautical terminology and proper seamanship. Norris took him as a model for the character of "Captain Jack" in this novel

BLIX

In his novel BLIX (Copyright 1899 by Doubleday & McClure), the main character is Conde Rivers, a simple man who writes for the Sunday supplement of a newspaper in San Francisco. He meets Travis Bessemer, a 19-year-old girl who is about to be a woman. They become close friends and Conde seals his fate when he confesses his love to Travis. It turns out that she doesn't love him and he doesn't love her either - at least that's what they say. After this mutual admission, they still have adventures together, all of which are pretty much made up. Travis cures his gambling addiction by just playing with her. The story is the easiest, most romantic and most trivial of his works. This novel is said to have autobiographical traits, because it was during this time that he met Jeanette Black, then 17 years old, his future wife.

McTeague - a story of San Francisco

The fact that the Doubleday & McClure Company, New York's publisher, which had just been founded in 1897, decided to publish McTeague - a story of San Francisco in 1899 is downright surprising.

Even though William Dean Howells praised "the little miracles of observation" in the book review of "Atlantic Monthly" and praised Willa Cather McTeague as a true study of American life by adapting it to the style of Émile Zola, Norris was considered an author by other critics of a perverted, dirty book.

Vulgar, gruesome, disgusting, dirty, repulsive, evil were the typical terms with which American and English critics reacted to McTeague, just as they had done two decades earlier with Émile Zola's violations of Anglo-American taboos. Your reasons are immediately apparent the first time you read it. Words that have not previously appeared in the literature appear here, such as B. urinate, or 'the heroine vomits and vomits' or that her siblings are abused by the father. Norris openly describes male and female sexual arousal in McTeague. Such scenes were not ready for printing, so that Norris was forced to rewrite them before the third edition in 1899. English publisher Grant Richards informed Doubleday & McClure that they would not market the book until literature censorship took place. Richards was adamant, and it was not until 1941 that a publisher restored the text to the original McTeague version.

McTeague's offense is reflected in the fact that the literary film adaptation by Erich von Stroheim as “Greed” in 1924 was still judged to be a “dirty film”.

Vandover and the Brute

Norris offered Vandover and the Brute to Doubleday & McClure again shortly after the release of "McTeague". However, they rejected the manuscript, as did William Heinemann a little later in London. Desperate that it would not be printed, Norris began to use some scenes from it for other narratives. Most of his novel, Vandover and the Brute , Norris wrote when he was a student at Harvard from 1894–1895 with the intention of describing some aspect of student life. However, the plot was unacceptable to turn-of-the-century tastes. When the book did finally appear in 1914, a critic of the Bookman stated that " it should have been published for private circulation only ". The story takes place in San Francisco in the 1890s. Vandover, fresh out of college and the son of a wealthy tenant owner, dreams of becoming an artist but lacks discipline. He drifts into a dissolute life of vice, prostitution, idleness and excess. His seduction of a young woman leads to her suicide and the death of his own father. Cheated of part of his inheritance by false friends, Vandover gambled away the rest. To entertain his friends he sometimes imitated a wolf, but now that his character is weakening, he identifies more and more with the "wolf" and feels the " Beast ”in itself. Eventually, broken in body and soul, he is reduced to the bum cleaning the apartment buildings he once owned. Norris describes his degeneration through attacks of lycanthropy , during which he walks around naked, crawling on all fours and howling like a wolf.

A man's woman

The idea for his next novel, A Man's Woman , came to Norris most likely from the book by Fridtjof Nansen about his polar expedition published by Harper Brothers in New York in 1897 . Norris' main character is also a fearless and fearless polar explorer, but Norris leads him on a different route than Nansen. When he returns from his expedition, he fights for the love of a confident nurse. There are enough exciting incidents in the novel to be a bestseller or "big hit". It shows Norris' attempt to examine the dynamic force in the connection between men and women.

The novel was finished on March 22, 1899 and sent to the printer in October of the same year. After the printing plates were made, word came that a play entitled "A Man's Woman" was written by Anne Crawford Flexner and is copyrighted. Since it was impossible to change the title of the novel after receiving the notification, it was published under its original title.

The octopus

Although William Dean Howell advised Norris to stay in New York in order to cement his reputation on the literary scene, Norris traveled to California in the spring of 1899 - armed with an advance from his publisher Doubleday. It has long been inspired by the Mussel Slough Tragedy, in which the Southern Pacific Railroad and the farmers fought a fierce battle over the purchase price of land in 1880. Norris finally wanted to complete his "Epic of Wheat". He began researching old editions of the Chronicle at the Mechanics' Institute Library in San Francisco and then traveled to the 5,000- acre San Benito Ranch that his college friend, Gaston Ashe, ran. Norris stayed here during the wheat harvest, studying the giant combine harvesters he used as the backdrop in his novel. Back in New York, a meeting with Collis P. Huntington , the builder of the railroad, was arranged for him so that Norris could hear his opinion. Norris later personified Huntington as Shelgrim in his novel. This drew his attention to the fact that the wheat farmers had tried to bribe the railway commission. This was a previously unknown aspect to Norris, one that shook his idealism and put wheat farmers on the same moral level as the railroad. In his novel, Norris Huntington (as Shelgrim) has it said that the conflict arose out of certain circumstances, "the naked law of supply and demand," which no one can stop or control. The overriding theme in Norris' novel is the impact of industrialization on peaceful farming communities and the resulting chaos in the lives of people who lived in those communities. His most conspicuous metaphor is that the 'tentacles in the shape of the train tracks are spreading so much that they are suffocating the land', hence the title of the book The Octopus .

Here is the original description of Norris:

“Presley saw again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon; but saw it now as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction on its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus . "

- Frank Norris : The Octopus, page 51.

At first, Norris had difficulties getting his book into place with his publisher. In 1900 McClure had given up his partnership with Doubleday. The new partner, Walter Hines Page , feared reprisals from the powerful railway company and hesitated to publish it. "The Octopus" became a bestseller and made a lot of money for Doubleday. A copy of the first edition from 1901, which he dedicated to his wife, has been preserved. Norris received praise for this book, and critic Charles Child Walcutt saw it as "one of the finest American novels written before 1910" (one of the finest American novels written before 1910.)

A deal in wheat

In August 1902, Norris published his short story “ A Deal in Wheat ” in Everybody's Magazine , in which he described the corrupt business practices in agriculture. The price of wheat is the common thread of this story. While a couple has to give up their land because they are only supposed to get 65 cents a bushel for their wheat and have already invested $ 1.00, the grain traders on the Chicago Stock Exchange are trading at $ 1.50 a bushel.

The Pit - The Story of Chicago

The second part of his "Epic of Wheat" The Pit - The Story of Chicago appeared in 1902 as a sequel in the "Saturday Evening Post" and was published posthumously as a book in 1903. This book described the practices of grain dealers on the stock exchange in far greater detail than the aforementioned short story and was also a great success.

Norris' naturalism

Realistic novels take human decision for granted. At the moment of the decision, e.g. B. Who marry or what profession, the main characters are aware of it. In contrast, the naturalistic novel shows how human actions are overridden or even given priority by external influences. Actions follow inescapable trajectories and their characters manifest little or no awareness. So Norris began writing novels in a naturalistic style, portraying his characters as irrational animals driven by their own instincts. Today naturalism is characterized as predestination, the modern successor to tragedy. Another aspect is the importance of psychological predestination by forces such as habit or compulsion.

In McTeague he describes how economic circumstances, alcoholism, disposition and chance can force a man to become a murderer.

Norris believed that a novel should have a moral purpose, to make people aware of the tragedies and hardships of those around them and to prove that injustice, crime and inequality do exist.

Film adaptation of his books

In 1922 the book "Moran of the Lady Letty" (German title: "Das Piratenschiff") directed by George Melford was filmed with Rudolph Valentino as Ramon and Dorothy Dalton as Moran in the lead roles. With this film Valentino's image should be established as a "latin lover".

The novel "McTeague: A Story of San Francisco" (Eng. "Greed for Gold") was used by Erich von Stroheim as a template for the legendary silent film Greed (1924). The film is considered one of the most important works in film history . About Stroheim's film adaptation: See Wikipedia article → Greed (1924)

As early as 1909, DW Griffith had adapted Norris' “The Pit” for his short film “ A Corner in Wheat ”.

Phi Gamma Delta student association

In 1894 Frank Norris had an elaborate joke ceremony "Hail the pig!" For the annual suckling pig meal that took place on the eve of the football game between Stanford and California universities at the "Old Poodle Dog" on the corner of Bush and Grant streets , wrote and suggested that this meal be repeated annually. (It took place here until the Great Fire of San Francisco in 1906.) This proposal was accepted by the 20 members. Each brother was called by name and had to renew his oath of allegiance to the Phi Gamma Delta connection by kissing the pig's nose. On November 28, 1900, Norris sent an "exile toast" to the Brotherhood from New Jersey, which was read out. After Norris' death, this suckling pig meal was dedicated to him and the custom spread throughout the country among other Phi Gamma Delta brotherhoods.

Frank Norris was buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland , California. Once he rested in the shade of four Irish yew trees. His student fraternity Phi Gamma Delta of the University of California had an approximately eight feet high tombstone erected in the style of the Arts and Crafts movement. It is decorated with three ears of wheat as a tribute to his novel "The Octopus", which is set in the wheat-growing area of ​​the San Joaquin Valley. His name is Frank Norris (Benjamin omitted) and the year of birth and death in Roman numerals (MDCCCLXX-MCMII) to somewhat obscure the fact that this distinguished and nationally recognized writer was only 32 years old. Inscription: Beloved by his brothers in Phi Gamma Delta who cherish his memory and testify their gratitude for his devotation to the fraternity (Beloved by his brothers of the Phi Gamma Delta who keep his memory and express their gratitude for his devotion to the fraternity )

family

In October 1899, Norris returned to New York, head full of impressions for his new book. Four years earlier he had fallen in love with a debutante from San Francisco, Jeanette Black, and the romance always blossomed whenever he got there. Jeanette was 9 years younger than Frank and a beauty in the style of the " Gibson Girls ". In his novel "BLIX" he is said to have processed autobiographical features of this relationship.

Frank and Jeanette were married on February 12, 1900 at St. George's Episcopal Church in New York and moved into a two-room apartment on Washington Square. In October, however, they moved to Roselle, New Jersey, so Frank could finish his Octopus manuscript without the distractions of the big city. A daughter was born on February 9, 1902. They intended to leave New York and make San Francisco their home. They also wanted to travel to Asia on a sailing ship, because the last part of the "Epic of Wheat" was supposed to deal with hunger there - or in Europe.

In 1903 Jeanette Norris published "The Complete Works" of 100 sets each, printed on Strathmore paper, in seven volumes. Later, Frank's brother Charles expanded them to 10 volumes.

In the foreword to “ The third circle ”, Gelett Burgess and Will Irving report that one night they snuck into the empty office building of the “Wave” and picked up a set of files that contained stories from Norris. In retrospect, they were happy about this break-in, as it was how the documents were saved from the Great Fire in San Francisco in 1906.

Works

Many of his works were only published posthumously

  • Yvernelle (1892, novel)
  • Moran of the Lady Letty (1898, novel, serialized) - German edition The ocean calls . Publisher: Greifenverlag zu Rudolstadt & Berlin, 2009. ISBN 978-3869398631
  • McTeague (1899, novel) - German edition Gier nach Gold , Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1958.
  • Blix (1899, novel)
  • A Man's Woman (1900, novel)
    • The Octopus (1901, novel) - German edition Der Oktopus Verlag: Rowohlt TB-V., Rnb. (July 1993) ISBN 978-3499400162
    • The Pit (1903, novel) - German edition Die Getreidebörse Verlag: Aufbau-Verlag ,; Edition: 1st edition (1979)
  • The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary
  • A Deal in Wheat , and Other Stories (1903, short stories)
  • The Joyous Miracle (1906)
  • The Third Circle (1909)
  • Vandover and the Brute (1914)
  • The Surrender of Santiago (1917)
  • Complete Works (1928, 10 vols.)
  • Kenneth A. Lohf: Frank Norris: a bibliography . Columbia University Libraries. Publisher: Talisman Press, Los Gatos 1959 - All publications are listed here.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bohemian Club in San Francisco American Heritage
  2. ↑ Les Jeunes and their magazine “The Lark” May, 1896 ( Memento of the original from January 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / thefindesiecle.com
  3. ↑ Hotel Del Monte (PDF; 6.6 MB)
  4. ↑ Everybody's Magazine
  5. ↑ Miracle Joyeux by Frank Norris, pp. 154-160 McClure's Magazine, December 1898 issue
  6. ^ "This Animal of a Buldy Jones" by Frank Norris, pp. 438-441 McClure's Magazine, March 1899 issue
  7. ^ Charles Gilman Norris: Frank Norris, 1870-1902
  8. ^ "All Wheat and No Chaff": Frank Norris' "Blix" and Willa Cather's Literary Vision Mary R. Ryder. American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 Vol. 22, No. 1 (Fall, 1989), pp. 17-30
  9. ^ Frank Norris: McTeague. Dedicated to LE Gates of Harvard University. Introd. by Henry S. Pancoast. The Modern Library of the World Best Books. Boni & Liveright, New York 1899 Chapters VIII - XI of the edition have been removed .
  10. ↑ 'Frank Norris' By Joseph R. McElrath JR. and Jese S. Crisler The New York Times. Published: January 1, 2006
  11. ↑ Vandover and the brute. Published by Doubleday, Page & Company, Garden City, New York 1914 With a foreword by Charles Gilman Norris on finding the manuscript
  12. ^ Fridtjof Nansen: Farthest North . Published by Harper Brothers, New York 1897
  13. ↑ Front page in "A Man's Woman"
  14. ↑ Railroad Control / Mussel Slough Tragedy ( Memento of the original from April 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.washoe.k12.nv.us
  15. ↑ The Octopus. A story of California
  16. ↑ The 0ctopus. A story of California . Published by Doubleday & Co. Inc. 1901
  17. ↑ A Deal in Wheat - Short Story - Online
  18. ^ The American Novel
  19. ^ Silent film "Moran of the Lady Letty"
  20. ^ The Fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta Frank Norris website
  21. ↑ find a grave
  22. ^ OPP Papers: Frank Norris
  23. ^ "The Gibson Girl" EyeWitness to History
  24. ^ Photo by Jeannette Norris Black, widow of Frank Norris Reproduced from Brown-tone originals by Brugeise & Eisen of (San Francisco), which were loaned by her son, Frank Preston of San Mateo. - in the Bancroft Library at UC Berkley
  25. ^ “The third circle” Introduction March 1909
  26. ↑ Frank Norris in the Notable Names Database (English)
personal data
SURNAME Norris, Frank
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Norris, Benjamin Franklin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 5, 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH October 25, 1902
Place of death San Francisco , California