Although he died less than five years after publishing his first novel, Frank Norris stands as one of the key figures of early twentieth-century American literature. In novels such as McTeague: A Story of San Francisco and The Octopus: A Story of California, Norris pioneered the use of realistic settings, violent conflicts, and working-class characters who were often portrayed as victims of their environment. These elements placed him in the literary movement known as American naturalism, alongside such authors as Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser. What distinguished Norris, according to Warren French in his Frank Norris, was that "his inside knowledge of the leisure class .... made it possible for him to escape the effects of the kind of impoverished childhood suffered by many 'realistic' and 'naturalistic' novelists who could not speak without envy or rancor of conditions Norris took for granted. While many writers have studied this Society, few have been able to give an intimate insight into the raw, unsophisticated ruthlessness that motivated 'conspicuous consumption.'"
Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr., was born in 1870 to a wealthy Chicago family, the first child in five pregnancies to survive infancy.
