Frank Norris, The Octopus

Jude Davies (University of Winchester)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.2: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Nineteenth Century, 1783-1900.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1901

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

The Octopus deals primarily with the social conflicts arising out of the industrialisation of the USA. It places these relations between human beings within a larger context of the relationship of humans with nature in its totality, understood by Frank Norris as supernatural “force”; a turn of the nineteenth century precursor of what we might think of today as ecology. Thus Norris conceptualised The Octopus as the first part of a three-volume “Epic of the Wheat”. The Octopus focused on the production of wheat in California, while a second part, The Pit (1903) went on to describe the financial processes of speculation centred on the wheat exchange, or pit, in Chicago. A final volume (never completed, …

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1059 words

Citation: Davies, Jude. "The Octopus". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=31, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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