SOURCE: "College High Jinks," in Frank Norris: A Biography, Doubleday, Doran, & Co., 1932, pp. 53-77.

In the following excerpt, Walker discusses Norris's early development as a short story writer.

That Norris's energy was not entirely absorbed by his college activities is made clear by his published writings which reveal his development between the period of the composition of Yvernelle and the time late in his university career when he started an ambitious program of novel-writing under the spur of Zola. During his four years at Berkeley he contributed three poems, four sketches, a play, and two short stories to student magazines, and, after abandoning that field, published one poem and twelve short stories in the San Francisco Argonaut, the Overland Monthly, and the San Francisco Wave. As many of the stories were patently experimental and all of them were to some degree imitative, they disclose his literary enthusiasms. The...