SOURCE: "The Significance of Frank Norris's Literary Criticism," in Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, revised edition, Southern Illinois University Press, 1984, pp. 112-20.

In the following excerpt, Pizer suggests that "Dying Fires" can be read as an allegory of Norris's view of literature.

It is not surprising . . . to find a Wilde-Kipling contrast running through Norris's descriptions of "literature" and "life," a contrast sharpened and vitalized by his personal rejection of the minor Bohemian worlds he encountered in San Francisco and New York. Indeed, he tended in his later criticism to establish Kipling-like conflicts between the virile artist and a corrupting city aestheticism. One of the best examples of this tendency, and also of Norris's basic "life"-"literature" antithesis, is his story "Dying Fires," published in 1902.

"Dying Fires" tells of Overbeck, a young man born and raised in the Colfax mining district of the California Sierras. At...