Frank Norris

Frank Norris (1870–1902) was an American novelist, the chief exponent of naturalism in the United States. Born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco, he studied painting in Paris and attended the University of California and Harvard, where he began McTeague, then worked as a correspondent in South Africa and Cuba and as a reader for a New York publisher. McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901), the first part of a planned trilogy on wheat, established him; The Pit followed in 1903 and Vandover and the Brute, written early, was published after his death. He died of peritonitis at thirty-two, leaving the trilogy unfinished.