The Pit
The second volume of Norris’s “Epic of the Wheat,” published a year after his early death, moves from the California ranches of The Octopus to the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Curtis Jadwin, a self-made speculator, grows convinced he can corner the wheat market, and his gamble swells into an obsession that consumes both his fortune and his marriage to the cultured Laura Dearborn. Norris renders the roar of the pit, the fever of buying and selling, with a force few American writers had matched, while tracing how greed slowly hollows out a private life. It stands as a landmark study of finance, appetite, and the wheat that dwarfs the men who trade it. 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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