Financial History Issue 130 (Summer 2019) | Page 10

EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE Frank Norris’s The Pit: An Unfinished Trilogy By Brian Grinder and Dan Cooper It was an enormous success, flying off bookstore shelves before they could be restocked. Some believe it inspired the Parker Brothers card game called Pit. At the very least, it helped the firm create its biggest moneymaking product to date. It was the basis for two Broadway plays, as well as one of D.W. Griffith’s most impor- tant silent films, A Corner in Wheat. 1 Serialization in The Saturday Evening Post yielded a $3,000 windfall for young Frank Norris and allowed him to finally make a living as an author. But by the time The Pit: A Story of Chicago was published in January of 1903, Norris was dead. Frank Norris, a native of Chicago, was an author and journalist who covered the Boer War in South Africa and the Span- ish-American War in Cuba. He wanted to make a living as a full-time author, and although he came from a fairly well-to-do family, he was forced to work part-time as a manuscript reader for Doubleday, Page and Company in order to make ends meet. Norris’s earlier novels had done well, but they never generated sufficient royalties to allow him to devote himself full time to writing. Financial markets became an acceptable literary topic in the late 19th century, as those markets became more prominent and began to affect the lives of those who were not actively engaged in market activities. Author Peter Knight argues that, “From the 1880s onward…numerous novels, [and] short stories… were less immediately con- cerned with attacking the stock market than making sense of it, rendering its mechanism and patterns legible for their readers.” How Norris hit on the idea of a wheat trilogy is not known. One of his first men- tions of it was in a March 1899 letter to William Dean Howells: “My Idea is to write three novels around the one subject of Wheat. First, a story of California (the producer); second, a story of Chicago (the distributor); third, a story of Europe (the consumer) and in each to keep to the idea of this huge Niagara of wheat rolling from Cover of the September 20, 1902 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, featuring Frank Norris’s The Pit. West to East.” Once the idea was approved at Double- day, Norris immediately went to Califor- nia to research the first part of the trilogy. He spent a great deal of time researching his trilogy novels. For The Octopus, he went to California’s wheat country to learn the ins and outs of farming, and he interviewed Collis P. Huntington, head of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Published in 1901, The Octopus: A Story of California 8    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Summer 2019  | www.MoAF.org chronicles the attempt of the fictional Pacific and Southwestern Railroad to force California wheat farmers off of railroad land they had occupied and improved hoping to eventually purchase their farms from the railroad. Although it wasn’t a best seller, The Octopus sold better than any of Norris’s previous novels. Once Norris finished The Octopus, he left Cali- fornia for Chicago to begin research for the second installment of the trilogy.