Editing Frank Norris (section)

==Career==
Frank Norris's work often includes depictions of suffering caused by corrupt and greedy turn-of-the-century corporate [[Monopoly|monopolies]].<ref>Rothstein, Morton (1982). "Frank Norris and Popular Perceptions of the Market," ''Agricultural History'', Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 50–66.</ref><ref>Zayani, Mohamed (1999). ''Reading the Symptom: Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and the Dynamics of Capitalism''. New York: Peter Lang.</ref> In ''The Octopus: A California Story'', the Pacific and Southwest Railroad is implicated in the suffering and deaths of a number of ranchers in Southern California.  At the end of the novel, after a bloody shootout between farmers and railroad agents at one of the ranches (named Los Muertos), readers are encouraged to take a "larger view" that sees that "through the welter of blood at the irrigating ditch&nbsp;... the great harvest of Los Muertos rolled like a flood from the Sierras to the Himalayas to feed thousands of starving scarecrows on the barren plains of India".  Though free-wheeling market capitalism causes the deaths of many of the characters in the novel, this "larger view always&nbsp;... discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good".

The novel ''[[Vandover and the Brute]]'', written in the 1890s, but not published until after his death, is about three college friends preparing to become successful, and the ruin of one due to a degenerate lifestyle.<ref>Geismar, Maxwell (1953). "Frank Norris and the Brute." In: ''Rebels and Ancestors''. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 3–66.</ref>

In addition to Zola's,<ref>Montague, G.H. (1901). [http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044107292385;view=1up;seq=232 "Two American Disciples of Zola,"] ''The Harvard Monthly,'' Vol. 32, pp. 204–212.</ref> Norris's writing has been compared to that of [[Stephen Crane]],<ref>Wertheim, Stanley (1991). "Frank Norris and Stephen Crane: Conviction and Uncertainty," ''American Literary Realism, 1870–1910'', Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 54–62.</ref> [[Theodore Dreiser]], and [[Edith Wharton]].<ref>McElrath, Joseph R. Jr., and Gwendolyn Jones (1994). "Introduction" to ''The Pit''. New York: Penguin Books.</ref>