The Octopus
Frank Norris drew on the real Mussel Slough shootout of 1880 for this sweeping naturalist novel, the first volume of his unfinished “Epic of the Wheat.” Wheat ranchers across California’s San Joaquin Valley find themselves at war with the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad, whose freight rates and land grabs threaten to ruin them. The poet Presley watches the struggle unfold as growers like Magnus Derrick and the hot-tempered Annixter organize against the corporation’s agent, S. Behrman. Norris frames the fight less as a matter of individual villainy than of vast impersonal forces, the railroad and the wheat itself moving with the indifference of nature. It endures as one of the strongest American novels about industrial capitalism and the land. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.
About the Author
Frank Norris (1870-1902) was an American novelist and a leading voice of literary naturalism. Influenced by Emile Zola, he wrote fiction that framed human behavior as the product of blunt biological and economic forces. He died at thirty-two, leaving his ambitious wheat trilogy unfinished.
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