Charles G. Norris, author of eleven provocative novels, has been unduly neglected by critics since his death in 1945, although during his lifetime his work was highly praised by some of the leading literary figures of the day. But this fame did not come to him until the publication of Brass (1921), ten years after his wife, Kathleen Thompson Norris (1880-1966), had captured America with her short stories and novels. As a young writer he was proud to be known as the brother of the novelist Frank Norris (1870-1902), for Frank, the older son, had been his idol and inspiration, spending much time telling his younger brother adventure stories and, while in Paris, sending him installments of his fourteenth-century romance, "Gaston le Fox," prompting Charles (at ten) to write his own novel, a 200,000-word romance about Louis XIV, "In the Reign of the Grand Monarch." It was when he found...