McTeague: A Story of San Francisco
Frank Norris
Jan 1899 · Castrovilli Giuseppe
Ebook
442
Pages
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About this ebook
McTeague, a San Francisco dentist, marries Trina, a thrifty woman who has won $5,000 in a lottery. She banks this money and, by scrimping and saving, hoards most of the money her husband makes. Marcus Schouler, Trina's frustrated former suitor, discovers that McTeague does not have a license to practice dentistry and causes him to lose his business. McTeague can make only a poor living as a laborer, and he and Trina eventually drift to squalid quarters. Trina hoards money compulsively, and McTeague, crazed with the knowledge of the money, kills her and escapes with the gold, fleeing into Death Valley. Marcus goes after him, and the men fight. McTeague kills Marcus but finds himself handcuffed to the dead man. Unable to find the key to free himself, McTeague dies of thirst.
About the author
Considered one of the leading pioneers in American Naturalism, Frank Norris is read and studied for his vivid and honest depiction of life at the beginning of a lusty and developing new century. Born in Chicago, he moved to San Francisco with his well-to-do family when he was 14 and went on to attend the University of California and Harvard University before becoming a war correspondent in South Africa and Cuba. His early apprentice work consisted mostly of rather unremarkable adventure stories, but with the long-gestating McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), he struck a new note. That powerful study of avarice in a seedy section of the Bay Area may well be Norris's masterpiece. The Octopus (1901), the first of Norris's projected Epic of the Wheat series, deals with the raising of wheat in California and the struggle of ranchers against the railroads, while The Pit (1903) is a novel about speculation on the Chicago wheat exchange. Unfortunately, Norris died suddenly after an operation for appendicitis. Like Stephen Crane, a writer with whom Norris is frequently compared, Norris died too young to fulfill his considerable promise, but he has more than held his own ground among turn-of-the-century writers whose works have lived. One reason may be that he took his craft as a writer seriously, as is shown by his posthumously published Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays (1903) and The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, edited by Donald Pizer.
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