The “idea” for the story–his “epic” novel–was “so big that it frightens me at times,” the young novelist had informed his mentor. Nevertheless, Norris was determined to press forward, and he did, writing away in his Washington Square apartment throughout 1900 in what historian Kevin Starr called “almost a single act of spontaneous composition.” (Kevin Starr, Introduction to The Octopus, Penguin Books, 1986)

     Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. was the ideal candidate to tackle the task. Brash, handsome, he was born in Chicago in 1870, the son of a wealthy wholesale jeweler. When Frank was fourteen, the family moved to Oakland, then a year later settled in San Francisco. They lived in an Italian style Victorian with a great bay window, near Van Ness and Polk, bustling streets filled with pawnshops and small tradesmen. This was the neighborhood that Norris would depict in McTeague, the 1899 novel that the young author hoped would capture life in San Francisco as Emile Zola’s novels had done for Paris.

      In the 1880s, San Francisco was at once rough and glittering, like the gold nuggets that the ‘49ers had pried from the earth and which built their mansions on the steep hills overlooking the bay. For an aspiring writer, the young city teemed with possibilities. The Gold Rush had drawn adventurers of all kinds and left behind other monuments besides mansions, including saloons and bordellos, whose denizens had come from as far away as Chile and Peru.

     In a rising metropolis, as in a young nation, history can move at pell-mell speed. By the 1860s when the piston engine gave birth to the locomotive, the old ‘49ers were squeamish about putting their capital into the railroads that were expanding across the country.

     In California, this vacuum was filled by a small group of newly rich Sacramento merchants. Their numbers included Charles Crocker, an ex-blacksmith from New York, and Collis Huntington who had worked as a laborer upon his arrival in California and who later rose to be president of the mighty Southern Pacific.

     Familiar with the wiles of the state capitol, they would become adept at bribing the legislature and packing the Railroad Commission to get their way. In The Octopus, Norris would depict Huntington as the pitiless railroad boss, Shelgrim, a man to whom the laws of supply and demand were a force of nature that swept aside everything in their path.

     Frank Norris’s mother had been a stage actress before her marriage, and she encouraged her son’s artistic aspirations. After a year in a public high school, Norris, his mother, and young brother went to Paris so Frank could study painting.

     In the City of Light, Norris sketched medieval armor in museums and learned enough Old French to read The Song of Roland in the original. This romantic view of history would later carry over to his writing in The Octopus.

     Norris attended art classes in the morning and began sketches for a painting of the Battle of Crecy, the 1346 encounter in which English archers defeated French knights and ended the Age of Chivalry. Although the painting was never completed, when Norris turned from art to writing a few years later, his creative approach remained visual. In filming Greed, the 1923 movie based upon McTeague, director Erich Von Stroheim is reported to have followed the book’s plot “page by page, never missing a paragraph.” (Kenneth Rexroth, Afterward to McTeague, New American Library, 1964) . The ten hour production was cut by producer Irving Thalberg to a more manageable two.

     Although The Octopus was composed before the first cameras rolled in Hollywood, there are parts that are almost cinematic. These include a shootout at a barn dance and one scene in which the narrative cuts back and forth between a farmer’s widow starving in the streets of San Francisco and a dinner party at the home of a railroad prince at which guests enjoy pheasant and sumptuous desserts.

     In 1890 Norris returned from France and entered the University of California at Berkeley. The young university had an exciting faculty, some of whom influenced the future novelist’s thinking. Foremost was zoologist Joseph LeConte whose lectures on evolution attempted to reconcile man’s brutal animal nature with the teachings of Christianity. It was the lectures of LeConte, and the writings of Cesare Lombrosco, a nineteenth century Italian sociologist, that led Norris to conclude that man was at war with himself, torn by heredity and a quest for spirituality.

     LeConte was a Southerner who had procured ordnance for the Confederacy during the Civil War. According to Donald Pizer, a noted Norris scholar, the professor’s lectures and writing influenced Norris’s view on the supposed supremacy of the Anglo Saxon race. To Norris, Latins are people of “untamed passions,” the Chinese “treacherous,” compared to the “robust Anglo Saxon strain.”

     Norris also may have been caught up in the Populist sentiment that swept the West in the 1890s and unfairly characterized Jews as agents of Eastern and international bankers that saddled farmers with harsh mortgages. Indeed, in one popular cartoon of the period, the House of Rothschild is shown as an octopus whose tentacles reach around the world. In Norris’s book, a hated Central Valley railroad agent is depicted as Jewish, though there is no historical evidence that such a person played a part in the actual events on which the story was based.

     As Professor Pizer points out in American Naturalism and the Jews, Norris’s anti-Semitism “...has long been an embarrassment to admirers of the vigor and intensity of his best fiction and has also contributed to the decline of his reputation during the past several generations.” ( University of Illinois Press, 2008).

      The author decided to base the first volume–The Octopus–on an incident known as the Mussel Slough affair that had occurred in the San Joaquin Valley in 1880. A group of farmers had taken up arms against the railroad that was trying to evict them after reneging on an apparent promise to sell them land cheaply. Both sides refused to budge, leading to a bloody showdown alongside an irrigation ditch the farmers had dug in the sandy soil.

      The origin of the tragedy reached back to 1862 when a wartime Congress gave private promoters, including Collis Huntington, millions of dollars to link California with the Union Pacific Railroad in the East. As an added incentive, the railroads were granted alternate sections of land on each side of the tracks–over 12,000 acres for each mile developed.

      Even before the line was extended to the Central Valley, the railroad lured settlers west with circulars promising that after the land was improved, “most” would be sold at “$2.50 to 5.00" an acre, the going rate for public lands.

      Mussel Slough is in the county of Tulare–Spanish for marshland–and for twenty years, the farmers worked the soil, raising golden crops of wheat, “as far as the eye could reach,” as Norris would write.

      Early on, the farmers doubted the railroad’s promise to sell them land at a fair price. To avoid taxes, the Southern Pacific delayed extending its line to the Central Valley. When the route was built, the railroad charged exorbitant rates that were set by its handpicked commission. The farmers brought a test case in federal court to invalidate the railroad’s land patents, but a pro-business judge named Sawyer ruled against them.

      The circulars that drew the settlers to California had loopholes drafted by railroad lawyers. When the Southern Pacific valued the Mussel Slough parcels at forty dollars–well above the quoted rates–the farmers, some of whom were former Confederate soldiers, balked.

      Suits were successfully brought to evict the squatters; the new tenants were driven away by a masked mob. To protect their land, the farmers bought rifles, and began training as a militia, as Professor Oscar Cargill later wrote. (Oscar Cargill, Afterward to The Octopus, New American Library, 1964)

      The railroad struck back. It found dummy buyers, named Hart and Crowe, to purchase the land of disposed farmers. Crowe–was a skilled gunman. When the new owners showed up in Hanford to take possession of their land, they were accompanied by a U.S. marshal. Before he could serve his papers, an armed group demanded that he turn back.

      The marshal was about to retreat when Crowe pulled out a shotgun and blasted a league member in the face. The gun battle was on. Someone took a clear shot at Crowe, but the gun misfired. The mishap proved costly, for Crowe’s aim was deadly; three farmers died in the field. Two others and Hart expired from their wounds later.

      The marshal was unscathed. Crowe escaped into the wheat fields where he was found, shot dead in the back by an unknown avenger. In California, feelings ran high against the Southern Pacific; the San Francisco Chronicle described railroad owners as “transportation robbers.”

      Brought to trial, the league’s ringleaders were convicted only of obstructing a federal officer in performance of his duty, and served eight months in a San Jose prison. Upon release, they were saluted by a brass band and treated as returning heroes back home in Hanford.

      This was the drama that had captured Frank Norris’s imagination, and finally in the spring of 1899 drew him back to California “to study the whole thing on the ground.”

      Armed with a small advance from Doubleday, Frank began his research in San Francisco, where he poured over back issues of the Chronicle at the Mechanics’ Institute Library on Post Street. The facts about wheat farming were “piling up B I G,” he wrote in a letter quoted by critic Carvel Collins. (Carvel Collins, Introduction to McTeague, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965 ) Soon Norris was sure his book would be “straight naturalism with all the guts I can get into it.”

      The author briefly visited Hanford, then headed to the San Benito Ranch, some one hundred miles away for an extended stay. Located near the coast, the 5,000 acre ranch was owned by a college chum named Gaston Ashe, and his wife Dolce, who was descended from one of the Spanish land grant families.

      On the ranch, Norris took his place in the field during wheat harvest and studied the operations of the huge threshing machines, which he used as background for his novel. He also met a pretty Spanish nurse on whom he modeled Angele Varian, the ethereal beauty whose death in childbirth forms one of the book’s subplots.

      In constructing his novel, Norris took considerable literary license by moving an old Spanish mission inland and by making his fictitious ranches far larger than those in Tulare County where the farmers who worked the dry soil were known as “sandlappers.”

      The Octopus did not depict a class struggle; for that literary vogue was still thirty years away. Rather, Norris pitted prosperous farmers against the even richer railroad to give the story what Jack London later called “Titanic results.”

      Frank returned to New York in October 1899, filled with ideas for his story. It was an extremely happy time for him. He had fallen in love with Jeanette Black, a San Francisco debutante whom he had met at a dance some four years earlier. Their romance blossomed when Norris visited the city to research his novel, and Jeanette then joined him in New York.

      Jeanette was nine years the author’s junior. She was very fashionable, in a turn of the century style, with, as Kevin Starr notes, “brown eyes and Gibson girl hair piled high on her head.” Frank’s mother objected to the alliance, partly on the grounds that Jeanette’s father had been born in Ireland, but the couple were married in St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York City in January 1900.

      The newlyweds settled in a two room apartment where Norris threw himself into his work. In October, they moved to a cottage in New Jersey. There Frank was able to complete his manuscript free from the distractions of the city.

      Sam McClure had left Doubleday, and Norris lost a courageous supporter; a few years later, McClure’s Magazine was to publish Ida Tarbell’s sweeping attack on Standard Oil. According to Oscar Cargill, Frank’s new editor was “nervous” about Southern Pacific’s reaction to a novel about the Mussel Slough affair.

      A meeting was arranged between Collis Huntington and the young author so that he might hear the railroad’s side of the story. The meeting took place in Huntington’s New York office. Norris fictionalized the scene in The Octopus in which Presley, the young poet, tangles with Shelgrim, the mighty railroad boss.

      Huntington was an imposing man with his white beard and stern manner. In the novel, Shelgrim is a "powerful" figure who brusquely dismisses the deadly conflict between the railroad and farmers as "a force born out of certain conditions"--the naked law of supply and demand. "I--no man--can stop or control it," he proclaims, before sending Presley away "stupefied--his brain in a whirl," as Huntington had probably done to Norris.

      More importantly, Huntington revealed that the wheat farmers had tried to bribe the Railroad Commission. This disclosure shook Norris’s idealism and put the farmers on the same moral plane as the Southern Pacific. Norris used the incident which blunted the book’s harsh criticism of the railroad and added to the raw naturalist landscape, filled with shady lawyers, a blackmailing newspaper editor, and a local railroad agent called Behrman who wanted to charge “whatever the traffic will bear.”

      The Octopus was published in April 1901, a month after its author turned 31. “Few major American novels have been as simultaneously dismissed and respected,” Starr has concluded. The contemporary reviews set “a pattern of response that has characterized more than eighty years of critical commentary.” A typical judgment was that of The Athenaeum, a Boston journal, whose reviewer criticized Norris’s verbosity and repetition, but conceded that The Octopus remained “a powerful and tragic piece of fiction.”

      Ever restless, Frank visited Chicago to research The Pit, his next novel, about the distribution of wheat. The book was written hurriedly, and when posthumously published in 1903, the critics agreed it suffered from prolixity, like The Octopus, but lacked that story’s Homeric breath.

      For several years, Norris had planned to move back to San Francisco. Howells had urged him to wait until he had established his reputation among the New York literati. With the first gush of royalties from The Octopus Frank, Jeanette, and their infant daughter relocated to the city Norris regarded as home.

      “Happiness in this world,” Frank had written his young brother, Charles, “is being able to devote all your time to work you love; nothing else matters.” Later, Charles became a popular novelist and spent decades as the guardian of his brother’s literary reputation.

      Frank was planning a trip to the Orient with Jeanette on a tramp steamer to study the consumption of wheat and was thinking ahead to another trilogy on the battle of Gettysburg. According to Kevin Starr, who is now a professor at the University of Southern California, Norris considered that battle “the supreme moment in American history.”

      On October 20, 1902, Norris suffered what he thought was indigestion. He delayed going to the hospital, and when he got there, his condition was misdiagnosed; the author’s appendix ruptured, peritonitis set in. A few days later, Frank Norris was dead, his constitution having been weakened by the fevers he had contracted in South Africa and Cuba. Following an Episcopal service, Norris was buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.

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