Frank Norris

Norris was raised in San Francisco after a Chicago childhood, studied painting in Paris, and passed through both the University of California and Harvard without taking a degree, absorbed instead in the naturalist theories of Émile Zola. He worked as a war correspondent in South Africa during the Boer War and in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, where he contracted the malaria and rheumatic fever that weakened him permanently.

McTeague, his best-known novel, applied Zola's deterministic vision of heredity and environment to a San Francisco dentist's descent into violence. He then began an ambitious Trilogy of the Wheat, tracing grain from a California ranch to Chicago speculation to a starving Europe; only The Octopus and The Pit were completed before his death.

He died in San Francisco in 1902 of complications from a ruptured appendix, at thirty-two, leaving the trilogy's third volume never written.