SOURCE: "Poe's 'Fall of the House of Usher' and Frank Norris' Early Short Stories," in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, November, 1962, pp. 111-12.

In the following essay, Hill discovers traces of Poe's story in "A Case for Lombroso" and "His Single Blessedness. "

An apparent influence upon the early fiction of Frank Norris has been overlooked, to date, by the critics examining Norris' work. For example, neither Ernest Marchand, in Frank Norris: A Study (Stanford, 1942), nor Franklin Walker, in Frank Norris: A Biography (Garden City, 1932), discusses the parallels between Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher" and two of Norris' stories, "A Case for Lombroso" and "His Single Blessedness." Roderick Usher, for instance,

suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were...