Frank Norris is a central figure in American literary history mainly because of three novels, McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903). But he is also important because of what he indicates to the cultural historian: his works mirror changes occurring in his milieu during a remarkable period of intellectual and artistic transition at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The need to redefine man's situation in the "new world" revealed by scientists, by antitraditional social theorists, and by modern schools of philosophical inquiry was a primary motivation for Norris as he shaped his more serious writings. Conventional Judeo-Christian "certainties" about man, God, nature, and society had waned. Norris realized just as dramatically as Henry Adams that the useful and comforting truths of traditional culture had become either defunct or dubious. In the cultural crisis resulting, Norris was one of many writers who...