Begun while Norris was a student at Berkeley and Harvard and published in 1899, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco is a masterpiece of American naturalism. Set in the 1890s, the novel narrates the story of McTeague, an innocent, animal-like man from the mines of Placer County, California, who at the opening of the book has achieved a degree of civilization and is working as an unlicensed dentist on Polk Street in San Francisco. Through marriage to Trina, a middle-class woman, he rises socially and enjoys a few happy years until, forced to abandon his profession, he turns to drink and declines into bestiality and murder.

After an atavistic return to the mining country of his youth, he meets a melodramatic end in the desert wastelands of Death Valley.

The initial inspiration for this novel was quite probably a murder committed in San Francisco in 1893, while Norris...