At Last to Kiss Amanda

Frank, Norris

Dell

A realistic study of the disintegration of character, ending in murder.

McTeague

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Signet Classics

Preoccupied with death, and repressed in many areas of their lives, Victorians seem to have found an emotional outlet in ghost stories, eerie tales, and a fascination with the macabre. Writers of the era fed this appetite with a continuing feast of stories steeped in terror and the supernatural. This unique collection gathers together 21 of these Victorian-era spine-tinglers, but unlike most anthologies, which feature the same tired tales, this volume contains 21 outstanding, but neglected stories from that time period. The product of painstaking research in libraries, antique bookshops, and other out-of-the-way archives, these rare gems include the title story, a black comedy by Ambrose Bierce; "The Ship that Saw a Ghost," a tale of seafaring mystery by Frank Norris; "The Tomb," Guy de Maupassant's grotesque account of one man's incurable longing for his deceased lover; Richard Marsh's unsettling tale of "The Haunted Chair," and 17 more. Compelling tales by such lesser-known writers as Dorothea Gerard, J. Keighley Snowden, Robert Barr, and Georgina C. Clark round out this collection of carefully chosen, hard-to-find narratives, sure to delight the most discerning reader of Victorian tales of terror and the supernatural.

A Bottomless Grave: and Other Victorian Tales of Terror (Dover Thrift Editions)

Richard Marsh

Ambrose, Bierce

guy-de-maupassant

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Dover Publications

Lack of self-awareness and a weakness for alcohol lead to the moral degradation of San Francisco dentist, McTeague

McTeague (Library of America}

United States

Vintage Books

Like a predatory octopus, the railroad tracks of California squeezed the wheat fields and the farmers with its steel tentacles. A story of deep personal tragedies, The Octopus concerns political corruption and American enterprise

The Octopus

Barnes&Noble Books

McTeague is the story of a poor dentist scraping by in San Francisco at the end of the 19th century, and his wife Trina, whose $5,000 lottery winning sets in motion a shocking chain of events. Few works have captured the seamy side of American urban life with such graphic intensity.

McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

The Pit: A Story of Chicago

Genre Fiction

Linnaean Press

Pit : A Story of Chicago

West Richard

This Library of America volume presents three novels and the collected essays of the most promising of the American naturalist writers. Inspired by the “new novel” developed by Zola and Flaubert, Frank Norris adapted its methods to American settings, adding his own taste for exciting action and a fascination with the emergent sciences of economics and psychology. Vandover and the Brute (1914) was published posthumously but written in 1895 during Norris’s year at Harvard. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, and debauchery reduce young Vandover, once a fashionable playboy and aspiring artist, to virtual bestiality. His dissipation is described with shocking realism, as Norris paints each level of San Francisco society he encounters in his descent. The novel McTeague (1899) represented a radical departure for American fiction of its era in its frank treatment of sex, domestic violence, and obsession. McTeague is a huge, simple dentist who dreams of having a giant tooth to hang outside his office and who carries his pet canary wherever he goes; Trina is his gentle, diminutive wife, who wins a lottery and compulsively hoards her money. They live on Polk Street in San Francisco, where the new middle class struggles with its pathological underside. Erich von Stroheim based his classic film Greed (1924) on this immensely powerful and grimly realistic novel. The Octopus (1901), the first work in Norris’s unfinished trilogy “The Epic of the Wheat,” is a novel about the ranchers and wheat producers of California. Pitted against the railroad monopoly and political machine, the members of the ranching community are forced to take up arms against the state. Inspired by the Mussel Slough Massacre of 1880, it depicts a band of strong ruthless Westerners who are crushed by inexorable forces of nature and capital they had sought to control. The twenty-two essays in this volume include book reviews, articles, literary columns, and parodies of popular authors in the hilarious “Perverted Tales.” LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Norris: Novels and Essays (Library of America)

Library of America

The Octopus : A Story Of California

Createspace

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Books by Frank, Norris