SOURCE: "Tales of Norris," in The New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art, September 26, 1903, p. 652.

In the following review, the critic praises the stories of the "buccaneer West" in A Deal in Wheat.

"A Deal in Wheat" is the first and the shortest of these stories by the late Frank Norris. The title, of course, suggests Chicago and The Pit, but the fact is that the stories which have already appeared in magazine form, are with one exception concerned with the gun-firing, cow-punching West of the plains, or the semi-piratic seafaring West of the Pacific Coast, not with the new West of the grain exchange and the gambler in breadstuffs.

They are forceful, dramatic, high-colored tales, done for the most part in the mongrel, garish, yet wonderfully enlivening dialect which fiction has assigned to the cow-punching hero and the three-card monte man. Of the latter not...