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The Octopus: A Story of California
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The Octopus: A Story of California Paperback -

by Frank Norris

From the publisher

Based on an actual, bloody dispute between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880, "The Octopus" is Frank Norris' story of the waning days of the frontier West. Based on an actual incident, "The Octopus" is set in the San Joaquin Valley of central California towards the end of the 19th century -- not long before it was written. It concerns a dispute between the Pacific & Southwestern Railroad (in historical reality, the Southern Pacific) which owns the land it runs through and the tenant wheat ranchers who farm it. This is a turn-of-the-century epic of California wheat farmers struggling against the rapacity of the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad, which will stop at nothing to extend its domination. The company controls the local paper, the land, the legislature and, when the farmers organize to protect themselves, even manages to control their representative on the state rate-fixing commission. An exemplary work of its time, "The Octopus" uses the perpetual production of wheat as a metaphor for the continuous cycle of the good of the earth prevailing over the evil of men, while examining the integrity and resolve of men faced with financial ruin. An unremitting tale of greed and betrayal, it was originally intended as one-third of Norris' never-completed "Epic of the Wheat" trilogy.

Details

  • Title The Octopus: A Story of California
  • Author Frank Norris
  • Binding Paperback
  • Publisher CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
  • Date 6/22/201
  • ISBN 9781463641634

About the author

Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. (1870-1902) was an American novelist, during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague, The Octopus: A Story of California, and The Pit. Frank Norris's work often includes depictions of suffering caused by corrupt and greedy turn-of-the-century corporate monopolies. In The Octopus: A California Story, the Pacific and Southwest Railroad is implicated in the suffering and deaths of a number of ranchers in Southern California. At the end of the novel, after a bloody shootout between farmers and railroad agents at one of the ranches (named Los Muertos), readers are encouraged to take a "larger view" that sees that "through the welter of blood at the irrigating ditch. Although he did not openly support socialism as a political system, his work nevertheless evinces a socialist mentality and influenced socialist/progressive writers such as Upton Sinclair. Like many of his contemporaries, he was profoundly affected by the advent of Evolution, and Thomas Henry Huxley's philosophical defense of it. Norris was particularly influenced by an optimistic strand of Evolutionary philosophy taught by Joseph LeConte, whom Norris studied under while at the University of California, Berkeley. Through many of his novels, notably McTeague, runs a preoccupation with the notion of the civilized man overcoming the inner "brute," his animalistic tendencies. His peculiar, and often confused, brand of Social Darwinism also bears the influence of the early criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the French naturalist Emile Zola.

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