Frank Norris
(Chicago, 1870-San Francisco, 1902) American storyteller.With his contemporary Stephen Crana, he is considered the initiator of naturalism in American narrative literature.Of Anglo-Saxon descent, Frank Norris was the son of a wealthy jewelry wholesaler.Since childhood, his mother had inspired him with enthusiasm for Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and R.L.Stevenson, and this admiration was decisive in his career.
Frank Norris
In San Francisco, where the family had moved when he was fifteen, and later in Paris, he studied painting.In the French capital he attended the Artistic Institute of Paris, at the time of Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, whose work he did not know.Frank Norris immersed himself in the studies of Jean Froissart, the Chanson de Roland and the Middle Ages.His medievalism assumed literary form, when he was nineteen, in Yvernelle , a chivalric romance in verse.
Returned to America, he spent four years as a rich and neglectful young man, although he studied literature at the University of California.Having read there the works of Zola (whose determinism he interpreted not as a scientific and philosophical theory, but as a purely dramatic element), he realized that the romantic thirst for the immense, extraordinary, fantastic and grotesque could be quenched in the everyday of the modern world; and the Scandinavian sagas prompted him by this already advanced taste for epic dramas, whose real protagonists were not men, but impersonal and inhuman forces.
These dramas, which he considered could be found "in the living room of the one who lives in front of us", constituted for Norris the truth behind those prosaic appearances celebrated by the great spokesman of American realism, William D Howells; and the revelation of this truth seemed to him the "raison d'être" of the novelist.Another year of reading and writing at Harvard led to his first novels, McTeague (unpublished until 1899) and Vandover and the brute (1914); Coarse but powerful works that make one think of Zola and study, in two different cases, the phenomenon of an atavistic return to bestiality.
After a tour of Africa, during which he witnessed the Boer rebellion, Frank Norris became a journalist in San Francisco, and later a reader of a New York publishing house.It was he who, in the performance of this last position, discovered Sister Carrie , by Theodore Dreiser.From his work of this period comes his obsession with the ideas of primary energy, brute force, animal and brain physical vigor, which were soon to be fully exploited by Jack London.Then, suddenly, he conceived the project of an American saga, The epic of wheat , into which he would pour the entire substance of his imagination.
From this project he derived, in 1901, The octopus , a novel in which the impersonal protagonists were grain and trains; and in 1903, The Well , a substandard sequel studying the fate of grain in the Chicago grain market.The play was to be a trilogy; but the projected third volume, The Wolf , was left in the pipeline when, at age thirty-two, Frank Norris died after an operation for appendicitis.
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