Dec 29, 2009

The Octopus | Author Biography

Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr.—Frank Norris, to his readers—is remembered for being one of the founding figures of American naturalism, a literary movement that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. His novels reflected the places that he had lived and his view that the world was changing for the worst, with humanity’s baser instincts overrunning its nobility.

Norris was born on March 5, 1870, in Chicago, Illinois, to a wealthy and artistic family. His father was a wholesale jeweler, and his mother, who had once been an actress,...