| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.3

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| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

The Long and Short of Frank Norris

McELRATH, JOSEPH R., JR., and JESSE S. CRISLER. Frank Norris: A Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Chronology, illustrations, notes, index. $38.00 (cloth), ISBN-13: 978-0-252-03016-1.
This is a very long biography about a very short life. An exceedingly busy and productive writer whose Naturalist novels McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903) confronted readers with disturbing images of greed and suffering at the turn of the twentieth century, Frank Norris was just 32 years old at the time of his death. In crudely quantitative terms, the 431 pages of Frank Norris: A Life average more than thirteen pages for every year of its subject's life. This is hardly in the same league with Joseph Blotner's behemoth, 1846-page Faulkner: A Life (1974), but quite a bit more generous with pages per year, say, than Fred Kaplan's recent The Singular Mark Twain (2003) and more or less comparable with Herschel Parker's two-volume Herman Melville (1996). Doubtless some readers will value the girth of this new biography more than others.	1
This much is certain: Professors McElrath and Crisler have produced a volume that will remain the definitive factual account of their subject's life for decades to come. They commenced their collaboration in 1971, as graduate students at the University of South Carolina, when they took the first steps toward producing a life designed to supersede the only full-scale biography available, Franklin Walker's Frank Norris: A Biography (1932). Building on Walker's interviews, notes, and correspondence and on the Frank Norris Collection of manuscripts, notes, clippings, and memorabilia—all at the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley—they have traveled widely in this country and abroad, gathering new materials on their subject. "It has taken over three decades," they report, "to accumulate, analyze, and correlate sufficient data to warrant the writing of this volume, which not only corrects erroneous claims made by Walker," but also "provides a fuller and more detailed account of Norris's personal life and professional career, often treating matters never addressed in Frank Norris: A Biography" (xiv).	. . .

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