EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE
Frank Norris’s The Pit (Part II): A Career Cut Short
By Brian Grinder and Dan Cooper
Frank Norris punched his meal ticket
with the success of The Pit, the second
book in his wheat trilogy. In the last Edu-
cators’ Perspective column, we explored
the difficulties Norris encountered as he
struggled to understand what was tak-
ing place in Chicago’s commodities mar-
kets. Fortunately, he was able translate his
knowledge into a highly readable novel
that captivated the imagination of readers.
He painted an accurate, realistic and dra-
matic picture of commodities trading in
the early 20th century 1 as his protagonist,
Curtis Jadwin, attempts and ultimately
fails to corner the wheat market. Norris
explains the end of the corner in naturalis-
tic terms writing, “…demand and supply,
these were the two great laws the Wheat
obeyed. Almost blasphemous in his effron-
tery, [Jadwin] had laid his puny human
grasp upon Creation and the very earth
herself, the great mother, feeling the touch
of the cobweb that the human insect had
spun, had stirred at last in her sleep and
sent her omnipotence moving through the
grooves of the world, to find and crush the
disturber of her appointed courses.”
The 32-year-old Norris had accom-
plished his goal of becoming a full-time
writer. In 1899, he described his vision of
success to his friend Bruce Porter shortly
before leaving New York on a trip to
San Francisco. According to Porter, Norris
exclaimed, “’Bruce, see that?’—as he waved
a little swagger stick between his hands ‘I’m
going to walk down Sutter St., swinging
that!—And they’ll say ‘That’s Frank Nor-
ris!’ I never liked him better than at that
moment,” wrote Porter, “…going home to
his boyish reward, for the struggle and the
travail—but with his goal attained.”
With the publication of The Octopus,
the first book in the wheat trilogy, and a
$3,000 advance from The Saturday Eve-
ning Post for its serialization of The Pit,
fame and fortune awaited Norris. After he
finished writing The Pit, Norris returned to
San Francisco in 1902 with his wife Jean-
nette and their daughter to enjoy the fruits
of his labor. The planned round-the-world
trip to research the third wheat novel, The
Wolf, was pared down to an excursion to
Australia with a stop in Samoa.
The Norrises had fallen in love with
the redwood forests while visiting Robert
Louis Stevenson’s widow, Fanny, at her
country estate near Gilroy, California. They
purchased a one-room log cabin on 10
acres next to Stevenson’s property for $500
and then spent another $550 on improve-
ments. Norris wrote to his friend F. Nelson
Doubleday, “I can shoot a deer from my
front windows… There’s a trout stream just
around the corner. We have the Stevensons
for near neighbors. This beats a New York
apartment.” Life was good.
But then tragedy struck. Jeannette fell ill
with appendicitis in mid-September and
underwent a successful appendectomy at
Mount Zion Hospital. Her quick recovery
allowed Norris to purchase tickets for their
trip to Australia in mid-October. Nor-
ris, however, began to suffer from acute
indigestion at about this time but chose
to do nothing about it. He finally agreed
to a physical examination with Dr. Julius
Rosenstirn, the same doctor who success-
fully treated his wife. Rosenstirn’s diagnosis
was appendicitis, and he recommended
immediate surgery. Norris, unconvinced
that his illness warranted such a radical
step, delayed treatment. He awoke two days
later in excruciating pain and was rushed
to the hospital. Unfortunately, Norris’s
appendix had burst and he was besieged
with gangrene. There was nothing to do
but irrigate the abdominal cavity and hope
for the best. Norris died three days later on
October 25, 1902. He was 32 years old.
At the time of Norris’s death, the sixth
installment of The Pit had just been pub-
lished in The Saturday Evening Post.
Installments ran until January 1903. The
unabridged book became available that
same month and went on to become one
of the best-selling books of the year.
The works of Norris have fallen out of
favor today primarily because of his racist
attitudes. Norris came from a snobbish
Left: Image from The Pit, as it appeared in the November 29, 1902 edition of the Saturday Evening Post.
Right: Announcement of Frank Norris’s illness on page 8 of the San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 1902.
8 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2019 | www.MoAF.org