[In the following excerpt, Cooper describes the stories in A Deal in Wheat as fascinating exercises by a developing novelist.]

Mr. Norris took himself and his work with great seriousness; his ideal in fiction was a lofty one, and he was steadily, persistently, indomitably, working towards it—indeed, in the opinion of many of those who best know his work, he had already crossed the threshold of achievement. Yet, whatever place is ultimately assigned him in the history of American letters, this at least is sure—that he was first and last an artist who depended upon bold lines and sweeping brush strokes, and that he could not be true to himself if hampered by a narrow canvas. To look to Frank Norris for short stories is as incongruous as to set a Rodin to carving cherry pits, or a Verestchagin to tinting lantern slides. Yet it does not follow that the recently published collection entitled A Deal in Wheat were not worth preservation. On the contrary, they are full of the keenest interest to all students of contemporary letters. No one but Norris could have written them; every page breathes forth the uncrushable vitality of the man. But to call them short stories is to misname them. They impress one as fragments, rather splendid fragments too, trials of the author's strength, before he launched forth upon a really serious work. Take, for instance, the opening story, which gives the title to the volume. It was palpably written for practice, a sort of five-finger exercise in preparation for Mr. Norris's last volume, The Pit—and from this point of view it is brimful of interest. But taken as a story, it is at once too long and too short. Mr. Norris attempted in it to cover altogether too much ground; he might with advantage have stopped some pages sooner than he did—and yet, at the end there remains a sense of incompleteness. In the whole collection, there is just one story that stands out, unique and forceful—"A Memorandum of Sudden Death"—and in this the effect is achieved at the expense of probability. It is a good illustration of the length to which his occasional accesses of riotous romanticism would carry the author of Moran of the Lady Letty. This "memorandum" is a fragment of a journal supposed to be written by a wounded soldier, one of a small band of troopers who have been surrounded and followed, day after day, by a band of hostile Indians, through desolate miles of sand and sage, until the final attack is made. Granting that a United States trooper, with one or two bullets in him, and his comrades lying dead and dying around him, could go on recording passing events with the accuracy, the minuteness, the astonishing atmosphere, of this story, one must admit that this is Mr. Norris's nearest approach to the artistic unity of an ideal short story.