Vandover and the Brute

Frank Norris wrote this stark naturalist novel while still in his twenties, though it stayed unpublished until after his death. Vandover is a well-off young man in San Francisco with a talent for painting and no defense against his own appetites. Drink, gambling, and idle pleasure wear him down, and a woman he has wronged kills herself, setting off a slow ruin. As his fortune and his will collapse, he sinks under a strange nervous disease that leaves him crawling and howling like an animal, the brute of the title finally loose. Norris studied moral decay with a cold, clinical eye learned partly from Zola. The result is a bleak account of degeneration and wasted promise. This free PDF and EPUB edition restores an early classic of American realism.