Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr.—Frank Norris, to his readers—is remembered for being one of the founding figures of American naturalism, a literary movement that flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. His novels reflected the places that he had lived and his view that the world was changing for the worst, with humanity's baser instincts overrunning its nobility.

Norris was born on March 5, 1870, in Chicago, Illinois, to a wealthy and artistic family. His father was a wholesale jeweler, and his mother, who had once been an actress, encouraged her children toward cultural affairs. When he was fourteen, his family moved to San Francisco, which is a prominent setting in The Octopus, as well as several of his other novels. He was educated at private schools, and in 1887 he moved to Paris, to attend the famous Académie...