Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1902-11-01
FRANK NoRRIs NOVELIST.
An Interesting and Appreciative Sketch
OF the Late Author.

II Is nard TO realize that Frank Nor
r1s Is dead. writes his friend. Archie
Goodrich in the Boston Transcript. He
seemed always to come out of the
springtime, to carry with him the
breath of eternal youth. He was lust
rounding out his career into that hard
earned great success and high useful
ness which everyone who knew him
felt to be his. He was the most yirile.
the most creative, the most broadly
imaginative Of the younger writers who
were to make the American literature
of the next quarter century. Whatev-
er else may be said of his writing, it
was living, Dulsng, human. The pity
of it, must be doubly felt in the sense
of deep personal lOss-for no one could
know Norris without having a real af-
lection for the man, as well as an adj
miratiOn for his genius and his high
ideals-and in a sense of the national
loss to our literature. If we could but
have the occult power of his own VAN
aimee!
Until six or seven years ago there
was nothing in Frank Norris's life that
was unusual or especially prophetic of
| the work he was to do. He had gone
from Chicago to California when he
was fourteen, and after three years
there. he went abroad and studied art
in Paris. Their back in California, he
spent his four years at the university.
There he was, his old chum has told
me. a healthy, full-blooded, college
boy full of enthusiasm, popular neces-
sarily and uncOnsciOusly, leader of
his fellows By mere charm of person.
atty. His room was the gathering
place for the crowd, and he alone could
entertain them all with the spontane-
Gus good humOr and unconscious wit
which always characterized him. He
wrote play that was memorable in
college circles, and when it was pub
lished later in the college annual, he
drew the illustrations for it. And
even in those days he saw beyond the
little things and felt the broad swift
current of great events. He was utter
" lacking in the petty prejudices
which are so common to mans col
lege days.
Having completed his course, he add
ed another year at Harvard, gradual
ing there in 1895. 1t was at Cambridge.
without question, that the ZOla-esque
realism. which was to mould so much
of his first work, gripped him. He
plotted "McTeague" as a class exercise
during that year. and was told that it
was too grim and horrible to make
peace of literature. When he went
back to California responsibilities came
upon him, and he began to write as an
assistant editor of the San Francisco
Wave. He did this journalistic work
with more or less success, but it was
not the serious. larger task he was born
to do. 1t was only the other day when
he was laughing over one incident of
his Wave experience. which seemed to
him particularly like a stage-play sit
ua ton. But it unquestionably gave him
that close touch with San Francisco
life which he wrought with such per-
feet detail into "McTeague." He was
working along with the book in his
spare hours.
When the excitement Of the Jameson
raid in South Africa was in the air he
had impulsively wanted to see fight
ing. and he went as correspondent Tor
San Francisco paper. His strong
po-British sympathies, however, made
the Beers warn him out of the country.
He went. but not until he had contract
ed bad fever, which, it is said, showed