It is always interesting to examine the tentative, youthful efforts of a writing talent whose mature work we hold in great respect. But the best of Frank Norris's earlier pieces from The Wave and elsewhere had already been gathered into a volume of abort stories called The Third Circle, and into Volume X of the more recent Argonaut Edition of his works. The sketches, interviews, short stories, parodies, articles and reviews which make up the diverse table of contents of this collection [Frank Norris of "The Wave"] are the last winnowings from Norris's output during the two years he was assistant editor of The Wave, under John O'Hara Cosgrove. For some reason which I am unable to fathom, the title of the volume ascribes them to the years 1893-97, though the dates listed inside, as well as Mr. Lewis's introduction, indicate that they were all written between '96 and '98.

"Judy's Service of Gold Plate" and "Fantaisie Printaniere," two broadly satirical, naturalistic short stories laid in San Francisco, anticipate the qualities, and the materials, even, of McTeague. Parodies of the short stories of Kipling, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Anthony Hope and (most cruel) Richard Harding Davis indicate an intelligent awareness of literary methods and technique. But despite a certain cramped affectation in his lighter literary and social comment, Norris was never remotely the esthete. With no trouble at all, David Belasco was able in a vivacious interview to convince the young skeptic of the artistic justification of Mrs. Lealie Carter's dangling melodramatically from the bell clapper in The Heart of Maryland.

To me the most interesting quality which this book reveals concerning the nascent author of The Octopus and The Pit is a curiously prissy attitude toward morals and manners. In a series of sketches called "The Opinions of Leander" he presents a vivid picture of the customs of those days when men promised their sweethearts that they would not stoop to smoking cigarettes, but would stick, instead, to the honest cigar; when a gentleman pounced upon the correspondence of a woman and decided definitely that she was not a lady if the paper she chose to write him upon was "unglazed, and ruled at that! Mph! Reeks of sachet, too!" Norris, the newspaperman, was considerably concerned lest visitors from the East should—and justifiably, he feared—get the impression that San Francisco girls were "fast"; and he worried a lot—in print—about the desperate effect on a girl's reputation of kisses and casual comment. Norris's trivially uplift attitude of mind seems, for a man of his ample powers, to have been both priggish and unworldly. . . .