Norris, Frank (Benjamin Franklin Norris)
Norris, Frank (Benjamin Franklin Norris)( 1870–1902),was born in Chicago, but in 1884 moved to San Francisco with his parents. After a year in a California preparatory school, he was sent to study art in Paris, where he spent his spare time writing medieval romances. While at the University of California (1890–94), he wrote short stories and sketches for student and local publications, as well as a romantic poem in three cantos, Yvernelle, A Tale of Feudal France (1892). Under the influence of Zola's fiction, he soon turned from his juvenile romanticism to naturalism and began a novel of lower- and middle-class life in San Francisco, which he later completed as McTeague (1899). He next spent a year at Harvard, where he wrote more of McTeague and parts of Vandover and the Brute (1914).
In 1895–96 he was in South Africa, but failed in his project of writing travel sketches because of fighting between the...
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