At a time when naturalism was being angrily dismissed as merely "dirty" or reviled as "ultraRealism" in an unnaturally gruesome and salacious vein, he saw something else, and a good deal more, in the new tradition.
Norris was uniquely suited for the main role he has been assigned in histories of American letters, for his literary experience and temperament--his personality as a litterateur, in short--had developed in such a way by the mid 1890s as to position him for a remarkably sensitive insight into the workings of the naturalistic sensibility. As Holman suggests, on occasion Norris could sound both the strident note and the doctrinaire tone. But his enthusiastically positive outlook was dominant when writing in his idiosyncratic way about naturalism, and that was largely the result of an orientation remarkably pluralistic and tolerant of diversity. He was born in Chicago to Benjamin Franklin and Gertrude Doggett Norris in 1870, moving to the San Francisco area in 1884; and he came of age during the heyday of progressive realism when William Dean Howells and others were nearing the end of the uphill trek begun by Honoré de Balzac a generation earlier.
This is a free page. This page contains 164 words. This
biography contains 4,907 words (approx. 16 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our (Benjamin) Frank(lin) Norris, (Jr.) Access Pass.
