Born in Chicago on 5 March 1870, Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. was the son of a self-made businessman who prospered as the head of a jewelry business and who sought to improve his fortunes by moving the family to California in 1884. San Francisco provided new opportunities, and this entrepreneur flourished in his realm of interest. At home, Norris's mother, the one-time actress Gertrude Doggett Norris, pursued the genteel life, leading Frank and his younger brother Charles (1881-1945), who also became a novelist, down Victorian cultural byways. While Benjamin Franklin Norris, Sr., speculated in land acquisition and rental properties, Gertrude Norris shared the polite delights of Scott, Browning, and Tennyson with her children. Frank was given the appropriate upper-middle-class education: private schooling at the Belmont Academy south of San Francisco and then at the Boys' High School in the city; Episcopal Sunday School, some athletics (he broke his arm playing football) and training in art at the San Francisco Art Association. The well-to-do family made the socially requisite grand tour in 1887, and Frank remained in Paris at the Atelier Julien to study painting when the rest of the family returned to San Francisco.
As would later happen during his college years, Norris did not seriously apply himself.
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