Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. (March 5, 1870 – October 25, 1902) was an American novelist, during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre.

His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A California Story (1901), and The Pit (1903). Although he did not support socialism as a political system, his work nevertheless evinces a socialist mentality and influenced socialist/progressive writers such as Upton Sinclair. Like many of his contemporaries, he was profoundly influenced by the advent of Darwinism, and Thomas Henry Huxley's philosophical defense of it.

Norris was particularly influenced by an optimistic strand of Darwinist philosophy taught by Joseph LeConte, whom Norris studied under while at UC-Berkeley. Through many of his novels, notably McTeague, runs a preoccupation with the notion of the civilized man overcoming the inner "brute", his animalistic tendencies. His peculiar, and often confused, brand of Social Darwinism also bears the influence of the early criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the French naturalist Emile Zola.

Bibliography

    * Moran of the Lady Letty (1898)
    * Blix Grosset & Dunlap NY (1899)
    * McTeague (1899) — a naturalist work about the life and trials of a dentist in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, California. Filmed as Greed by Erich von Stroheim in 1924.
    * A Man's Woman (1900)
    * The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903) — a collection of essay on the role of the writer
    * Vandover and the Brute (posthumously published 1914) — a study of degeneration.

The Epic of Wheat trilogy:

    * Octopus: A Story of California (1901) — describes the raising of wheat in California and the conflict between the wheat growers and a railway company; Norris was inspired by the events surrounding the Southern Pacific Railroad Mussel Slough Tragedy.
    * The Pit (1903) — the second novel in the trilogy, about wheat speculation within the Chicago Board of Trade.
    * The third novel, Wolf, was never written but was to have shown the American-grown wheat relieving a famine-stricken village in Europe.

(From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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A Man’s Woman by Frank Norris, the Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series, Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, Hazleton, PA 18202-1291 is a Portable Document File produced as part of an ongoing student publication project to bring classical works of literature, in English, to free and easy access of those wishing to make use of them.

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Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University

A MAN’S WOMAN
by FRANK NORRIS, 1904

The following novel was completed March 22, 1899, and sent to the printer in October of the same year. After the plates had been made notice was received that a play called “A Man’s Woman” had been written by Anne Crawford Flexner, and that this title had been copyrighted. As it was impossible to change the name of the novel at the time this notice was received, it has been published under its original title.
F.N.
New York.

AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning everybody in the tent was still asleep, exhausted by the terrible march of the previous day. The hummocky ice and pressure-ridges that Bennett had foreseen had at last been met with, and, though camp had been broken at six o’clock and though men and dogs had hauled and tugged and wrestled with the heavy sledges until five o’clock in the afternoon, only a mile and a half had been covered. But though the progress was slow, it was yet progress. It was not the harrowing, heart-breaking immobility of those long months aboard the Freja. Every yard to the southward, though won at the expense of a battle with the ice, brought them nearer to Wrangel Island and ultimate safety.

Then, too, at supper-time the unexpected had happened. Bennett, moved no doubt by their weakened condition, had dealt out extra rations to each man: one and two-thirds ounces of butter and six and two-thirds ounces of aleuronate bread—a veritable luxury after the unvarying diet of pemmican, lime juice, and dried potatoes of the past fortnight. The men had got into their sleeping-bags early, and until four o’clock in the morning had slept profoundly, inert, stupefied, almost without movement. But a few minutes after four o’clock Bennett awoke.

He was usually up about half an hour before the others. On the day before he had been able to get a meridian altitude of the sun, and was anxious to complete his calculations as to the expedition’s position on the chart that he had begun in the evening. ...

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