Overview

Frank Norris Remembered is a collection of reminiscences by Norris’s contemporaries, friends, and family that illuminate the life of one of America’s most popular novelists. Considering his undergraduate education spent studying art at Académie Julian in Paris and creative writing at Harvard and his journalism career reporting from the far reaches of South Africa and Cuba, it is difficult to fathom how Frank Norris also found time to compose seven novels during the course of his brief life. But despite his adventures abroad, Norris turned out novels at a dizzying pace. He published Moran of the Lady Letty in 1888, McTeague early in 1899, Blix later that year, A Man’s Woman in February 1900, and The Octopus, the first in his ultimately unfinished “Epic of the Wheat” trilogy, in 1901. By informing his novels with his own experiences abroad, Norris composed works that were politically charged and culturally relevant and that made considerable contributions to the character of American literature in the twentieth century. Frank Norris died at the age of thirty-two in 1902 from peritonitis resulting from a burst appendix, leaving behind a wife, a daughter, and an unfinished series of novels (two of which, The Pit and Vandover and the Brute, were published posthumously). The aim of Frank Norris Remembered, edited by Jesse S. Crisler and Joseph R. McElrath Jr., is to re-create the short, spectacular life of this American author through the eyes of those who knew him best. The fifty reminiscences included in this book feature the voices of Frank N. Doubleday; William Dean Howells; Hamlin Garland; Norris’s wife, Jeannette; and many others who were lucky enough to form a relationship with this vital twentieth-century American author, artist, and adventurer.

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9780817317959

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Frank Norris Remembered is a significant contribution to Norris studies and to the study of American literature more generally. As coauthors of the definitive Frank Norris, A Life (2006), Crisler and McElrath are well-positioned to draw upon their exhaustive research for that volume as well as to provide the contextual commentary that make volumes like this one successful. --Keith Newlin, author of Hamlin Garland: A Life and editor of The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism

This book is a valuable contribution to Frank Norris studies and to the nature and study of biographical research and work. Crisler and McElrath are strongly, probably uniquely, qualified to create a book of this variety. They have already published respected works on Norris, have done the most recent and accurate, and therefore most helpful, biography of the man. At the time of Norris's death, the press commented repeatedly about his being a writer whose early death blighted clear-cut great promise. Thus, many areas of Norris's life were shadowy. In this book we get many of those 'cobwebs' and shadows cleared away to get a portrait of Norris as much more of a human being and writer than has previously been the case. --Benjamin F. Fisher, author of Poe in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interview, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates and The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe <br>

Frank Norris Remembered is a significant contribution to Norris studies and to the study of American literature more generally. As coauthors of the definitive Frank Norris, A Life (2006), Crisler and McElrath are well-positioned to draw upon their exhaustive research for that volume as well as to provide the contextual commentary that make volumes like this one successful. Keith Newlin, author of Hamlin Garland: A Life and editor of The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism

When I get one of Those Letters, or face another review that accuses me of being a vulgar lowbrow--which to some extent I am--I take comfort from the words of turn-of-the-century social realist Frank Norris, whose novels include The Octopus, The Pit, and McTeague, an authentically great book. Norris wrote about working-class guys on ranches, in city laboring jobs, in factories. McTeague, the main character of Norris's finest work, is an unschooled dentist. Norris's books provoked a good deal of public outrage, to which Norris responded coolly and disdainfully: 'What do I care for their opinions? I never truckled. I told them the truth.' --Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft This book is a valuable contribution to Frank Norris studies and to the nature and study of biographical research and work. Crisler and McElrath are strongly, probably uniquely, qualified to create a book of this variety. They have already published respected works on Norris, have done the most recent and accurate, and therefore most helpful, biography of the man. At the time of Norris's death, the press commented repeatedly about his being a writer whose early death blighted clear-cut great promise. Thus, many areas of Norris's life were shadowy. In this book we get many of those 'cobwebs' and shadows cleared away to get a portrait of Norris as much more of a human being and writer than has previously been the case. --Benjamin F. Fisher, author of Poe in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interview, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates and The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe Frank Norris Remembered is a significant contribution to Norris studies and to the study of American literature more generally. As coauthors of the definitive Frank Norris, A Life (2006), Crisler and McElrath are well-positioned to draw upon their exhaustive research for that volume as well as to provide the contextual commentary that make volumes like this one successful. --Keith Newlin, author of Hamlin Garland: A Life and editor of The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism

Author Information

Jesse S. Crisler and Joseph R. McElrath Jr. are the coauthors of Frank Norris: A Life and the coeditors of An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906-1932 and Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches (both with Robert C. Leitz III), among other works.

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