Frank Norris is known principally as an American novelist rather than a western one. He was perceived as a national artist by the majority of his contemporaries, and at the time of his early death in 1902 his sobriquet, the American Zola, even indicated a transnational identity. His best-known work then, The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), was viewed not so much as a western but as an attempt to produce the Great American Novel. Further, his posthumous best-seller, The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1903), was seen by many as the accomplishment of that aim, and its subtitle made it clear that Norris could be as eclectic in his regionalism as he was in his prose style and narrative technique.

On the other hand, Norris in his essay titled "The Great American Novel," collected with others in The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays in 1903, insists that...