Mcteague

by Frank Norris

Overview

Newly-married, McTeague and Trina Sieppe appear to have a bright future, especially in light of Trina’s $5,000 lottery win. But when McTeague is barred from practicing dentistry, and Trina’s money-hoarding becomes pathological, the couple descends into poverty with stunning rapidity and far-reaching consequences.

Frank Norris’s 1899 novel explores the impact of jealousy and greed on an otherwise typical relationship. McTeague has been adapted twice for film, including the 1924 film Greed, directed by acclaimed auteur Erich von Stroheim.

HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781443441506
Publisher:	HarperCollins Canada
Publication date:	11/11/2014
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	385
File size:	452 KB

About the Author

Frank Norris was an American author who wrote primarily in the naturalist genre, focusing on the impact of corruption and turn-of-the-century capitalism on common people. Best known for his novel McTeague and for the first two parts of his unfinished The Epic of the Wheat trilogy—The Octopus: A Story of California and The Pit, Norris wrote prolifically during his lifetime. Following his education at the Académie Julian in Paris, University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University, Norris worked as a news correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, and covered the Spanish-American War in Cuba for McClure’s Magazine. Norris died suddenly in 1902 of peritonitis, leaving The Wolf: A Story of Empire, the final part of his Wheat trilogy, incomplete.

Reading Group Guide

An unflinchingly realistic portrayal of the moral descent of a San Francisco dentist, McTeague, first published in 1899, helped to propel American literature into the twentieth century. “The novel glows in a light that makes it the first great tragic portrait in America of an acquisitive society,” writes Alfred Kazin in the Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic. “McTeague’s San Francisco is the underworld of that society, and the darkness of its tragedy, its pitilessness, its grotesque humor, is like the rumbling of hell. Nothing is more remarkable in the book than the detachment with which Norris saw it—a tragedy almost literally classic in the Greek sense of the debasement of a powerful man—and nothing gives it so much power.”