Frank Norris Remembered

Part 4. Professional Years: New York, Cuba, Chicago, and San Francisco, 1898–1902

4 Professional Years New York, Cuba, Chicago, and San Francisco, 1898–1902 When Norris left San Francisco in the late winter of 1898, ostensibly to report on Mardi Gras in New Orleans but, of more personal consequence, to visit Jeannette , then studying at Monticello Female Seminary in Godfrey, Illinois, he had little idea that his departure from his sec­ ond home state would be permanent. Such proved the case, however, as an offer for full-­ time employment with S. S. McClure’s firm reached him at a hotel in St. Louis. Assigned to duty as a correspondent for McClure’s Magazine when the Spanish-­Ameri­can War began, Norris cultivated in earnest the persona of successful writer, and fellow authors James F. J. Archibald, Hamlin Garland, Arthur Goodrich, William Dean Howells, and Elizabeth Knight Tompkins and her sister Juliet had no trouble accepting him as such. Neither did his associates in the publishing industry, such as Frank Nelson Doubleday, Henry W. Lanier, and John S. Phillips, each of whom regarded Norris both as friend and employee. Young journalist Isaac F. Marcosson , one of the first to trumpet Norris’s talents in a series of enthusiastic reviews appearing in the Louisville Times, left an incisive account of their association, and Julie Herne summarizes the friendship she and her family enjoyed with the Norrises . For their part, business journalists George D. Moulson and Edwin Le­fevre good-­ naturedly attempted to assist Norris in comprehending the intri­ cacies of the stock exchange during his research for The Pit, while Dulce B. Davis had earlier opened her home to him, encouraging liberal access to her ranch in California and her knowledge of the area’s rich Spanish-­Californio heritage when he was working on The Octopus. As rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church, W. S. Rainsford welcomed Norris as both communicant and volunteer in educating young immigrants, and Grant Richards, publisher of Norris’s novels in England, amusingly recounts not just Norris’s own active literary production of six novels in five years but also Norris’s selfless support of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, when his own firm, Doubleday, Page & Co., had all but withdrawn its backing of the controversial novel. Yes, these were heady years for Norris, and all too brief ones as well. Still, that he was able to live them fully, engaged in the writing he loved, is as much as anyone has a right to ask. ...