Frank Norris

Novels and Essays

Vandover and the Brute • McTeague • The Octopus • Collected Essays

This volume contains three novels by Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute, McTeague, and The Octopus, as well as a selection of his essays.

Frank Norris worked on drafts of both Vandover and the Brute and McTeague while he was a student in Lewis E. Gates's writing class at Harvard University, 1894-95. Vandover seems to have been completed, or nearly so, before he left Harvard in 1895; McTeague was not finished until several years later. Norris offered Vandover to Doubleday & McClure soon after they published McTeague in early 1899, but when they declined the novel, as did William Heinemann of London a little later, Norris apparently despaired of seeing it published and began lifting scenes from it for other novels. As the manuscript of Vandover has never come to light, the only authoritative text of the novel is that prepared by Norris's brother, the novelist Charles G. Norris, for the first edition of 1914, published by Doubleday, Page & Co., Garden City, New York. In the foreword to the 1914 edition (not included here), Charles Norris wrote that the publication of the work was delayed because the manuscript of the novel had been lost in the confusion of the San Francisco fire of 1906 and had not been recovered until 1913. However, in a 1930 conversation he told Franklin Walker (Frank Norris's biographer) that the manuscript had been held for several years by Norris's widow, Jeannette, and that the fire story was not authentic. He also told Walker that in preparing the novel for publication he had had to make some cuts, eliminating some of the strong language and a long chapter early in the novel in which Vandover is drunk. He also cut a description of the parlor that Frank Norris had used in Blix and added about 5,000 words of his own. Whatever the accuracy of Charles Norris's later recollections, the 1914 text, in the absence of any earlier document, is the sole authoritative text of Vandover.

The holograph manuscript of McTeague, which served as printer's copy for the first edition, survived intact into the 1920s. The Argonaut Manuscript Limited Edition of Frank Norris' Work, published in ten volumes by Doubleday, Doran in 1928, included a leaf of this manuscript (in a special envelope) in the first volume of each of the 245 sets of the edition. Thus the manuscript was widely dispersed, and, despite the efforts of James D. Hart and Joseph Katz in recent years, only some 100 leaves have been recovered. However, since Norris was a member of the New York firm of Doubleday & McClure in 1899 when McTeague was published, he probably saw the novel through the press with some care. (The surviving leaves of the manuscript support this belief.) Many reviewers of McTeague noted the strong subject matter--apparently the episode in the Orpheum Theatre (pp. 335-38 of this edition) that describes little August's incontinence was particularly controversial. Norris revised the passage for the second printing, making it an account of McTeague's searching for his hat. Because the revision apparently resulted from outside pressure, this volume prints the text of the first printing of McTeague.

The manuscript of The Octopus is not known to survive. The first edition of the novel, published by Doubleday, Page & Co., went through five printings in 1901. A number of minor textual alterations appeared in each, with by far the largest number in the second printing. Some of these alterations corrected typographical errors; some made stylistic changes--for example, "jumped high" was changed to "jumped fair" (975.35) and "clamouring machinery" to "bellowing machinery" (1070.32). The nature of these changes suggests that they originated with Norris. Therefore, the text of the fifth printing of the first edition of The Octopus is printed here.

The year following Norris's death in 1902, Doubleday, Page & Co. published The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays by Frank Norris. That collection, which includes some of the essays printed here, appears to have been assembled by Jeannette Norris and her friend Isobel Strong. As Norris had no hand in preparing it and as its text frequently varies from the original publication in various magazines and newspapers, the collection has no authority. Therefore the texts included in this edition are those of the original periodical publications. The one exception is the essay "The Great American Novelist," which is cited in the The Responsibilities of the Novelist as having been syndicated for newspaper publication but for which no appearance other than Responsibilities has ever been found. Three paragraphs have been omitted from the Boston Evening Transcript text of "A Plea for Romantic Fiction." These paragraphs (which occurred following 1167.32 of this edition) describe women's education in America and bear no relation to the rest of the essay. Their presence is undoubtedly the result of an error in the Transcript editorial office. Internal subheads have been dropped from the World's Work text of "The True Reward of the Novelist."

The following are the sources of the texts of the essays included in this volume:

ýýýýý"Theory and Reality," San Francisco Wave, 15 (May 2, 1896), 8.
ýýýýý"Zola as a Romantic Writer," San Francisco Wave, 15 (June 27, 1896), 3.
ýýýýý"The 'English Courses' of the University of California," San Francisco Wave, 15 (November 28, 1896), 2-3.
ýýýýý"An Opening for Novelists," San Francisco Wave, 16 (May 22, 1897), 7.
ýýýýý"Fiction Is Selection," San Francisco Wave, 16 (September 11, 1897), 3.
ýýýýý"Perverted Tales," San Francisco Wave, 16 (December 25, 1897), 5-7.
ýýýýý"Frank Norris' Weekly Letter," Chicago American Art and Literary Review, June 22, 1901, p. 8.
ýýýýý"Frank Norris' Weekly Letter," Chicago American Art and Literary Review, August 3, 1901, p. 5.
ýýýýý"Frank Norris' Weekly Letter," Chicago American Art and Literary Review, August 24, 1901, p.8.
ýýýýý"The True Reward of the Novelist," World's Work, 2 (October 1901), 1337-39.
ýýýýý"Novelists of the Future," Boston Evening Transcript, November 27, 1901, p. 14.
ýýýýý"The Need of a Literary Conscience," World's Work, 3 (December 1901), 1559-60.
ýýýýý"The Mechanics of Fiction," Boston Evening Transcript, December 4, 1901, p. 22.
ýýýýý"A Plea for Romantic Fiction," Boston Evening Transcript, December 18, 1901, p. 14.
ýýýýý"Fiction Writing as a Business," Boston Evening Transcript, January 1, 1902, p. 17.
ýýýýý" 'The Literature of the West,' " Boston Evening Transcript, January 8, 1902, p. 7.
ýýýýý"The Great American Novelist," The Responsibilities of the Novelist (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903), pp. 85-89. (Listed in the bibliography of Responsibilities as syndicated January 19, 1903; this date, based on the correct dating of other syndicated essays misdated in the bibliography, is thought to be January 19, 1902.)
ýýýýý"The Frontier Gone At Last," World's Work, 3 (February 1902), 1728-31.
ýýýýý"Story-Tellers vs. Novelists," World's Work, 3 (March 1902), 1894-96.
ýýýýý"The Novel with a 'Purpose,' " World's Work, 4 (May 1902), 2117-19.
ýýýýý"A Neglected Epic," World's Work, 5 (December 1902), 2904-06.
ýýýýý"The Responsibilities of the Novelist," The Critic, 41 (December 1902), 537-40.

Doubleday & McClure, Norris's first publisher, as well as most American newspapers and magazines, followed American usage in spelling and punctuation. Norris's second publisher, Doubleday, Page & Co., adopted British usage in The Octopus and Vandover and the Brute, even though Norris himself preferred American style (as is revealed by the surviving manuscript leaves of McTeague). The spelling and punctuation of these first editions have been allowed to stand. Norris's essays in particular contain many variations in spelling and punctuation because of the different editorial practices of the journals in which the essays first appeared. These variations have also been retained.

This volume presents only the texts of these editions; it does not attempt to reproduce features of typographic design, such as the display capitalization of chapter openings. The texts are reproduced without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization often are expressive features, and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular.

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