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9780252077296 Academic Inspection Copy

Frank Norris

A Life
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Born in Chicago in 1870, Frank Norris led a life of adventure and art. He moved to San Francisco at fifteen, spent two years in Paris painting, and returned to San Francisco to become an internationally famous author. He died at age thirty-two from a ruptured appendix. During his short life, he wrote an inspired series of novels about the United States coming of age. The Octopus was a prescient warning about the threat of monopolies, and The Pit exposed the intrigues and dirty dealings at the Chicago grain exchange. Extensively reprinted, Norris's works have also found their way into popular consciousness through film (Erich von Stroheim's Greed), and even an opera based on his portrait of the huge, dumb, and murderous dentist, McTeague.Interest in this dynamic writer was wide and sustained, but Frank Norris and his family did biographers no favors. Norris burned most of his correspondence, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire devoured more, and his brother and widow dispersed his surviving papers as gifts. As a result, it was thought impossible to assemble enough material to surpass the single existing biography, published in 1932. Authors Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse S. Crisler, acknowledged as the leading experts on Norris, have spent have spent over thirty years overcoming these obstacles, devotedly amassing the material necessary to at last fashion a truly full-scale portrait of the artist. Anyone familiar with the breezier existing accounts of the man and hungering for the real story will agree that Frank Norris, A Life was worth the wait.

"The authors . . . began their research as graduate students in 1971 and have devoted most of their scholarly careers to finding out who Frank Norris really was.  Norris died unexpectedly of a ruptured appendix in 1902 at the age of 32, and the authors conclude that much of our existing information about his brief life is plain wrong. . . . In setting the record straight, the meticulous McElrath and Crisler have written the definitive biography of Norris. In it, they emphasize how appreciation of Norris's literary genius is inseparable from an untimely death that forever raised the unfulfilled promise of even greater work to come."--New York Times Book Review

"The meticulous McElrath and Crisler have written the definitive biography of Norris. In it, they emphasize how appreciation of Norris's literary genius is inseparable from an untimely death that forever raised the unfulfilled promise of even greater work to come."--New York Times Book Review

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