Frank Norris Collection of Papers and Related Materials, [ca. 1889-1930]

Summary

Creators:

Norris, Frank, 1870-1902

Extent:

Number of containers: 6 boxes, 2 portfolios, 1 volume and 1 oversize folder

Language:

English

Background

Biographical / historical:

Frank Norris, who was born in 1870 and died in 1902, proved himself, in his short writing career, to be a major American novelist and one of the most distinguished literary alumni of the University of California.

Born in Chicago, he came to San Francisco with his family when he was 14. After two years in an art school in Paris, he attended the University of California as a special student for four years, 1890-1894, and then did a year's additional work at Harvard University. He returned to San Francisco, became a newspaper correspondent during the Uitlander insurrection in South Africa and then a staff writer and sub-editor on the San Francisco Wave. Moran of the Lady Letty, which appeared serially in that magazine, brought him a job with S. S. McClure in New York, first as a reader and later as a correspondent for McClure's Magazine in Cuba in 1898. Returning to his job as publisher's reader, he applied himself seriously to his fiction and won recognition and fame. His writing was strongly identified with California, particularly his best known works McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901). He looked upon San Francisco as his home, and it was there he died in October 1902.

Physical location:

For current information on the location of these materials, please consult the Library's online catalog.

Related resources

Other descriptive data:

The collecting of Frank Norris materials at The Bancroft Library began in 1952 with the project, originating in the English Department of the University, to reassemble the pages of the one Norris manuscript known to be extant, McTeague. The pages of the novel had been included in the 1928 Argonaut Manuscript Edition of Norris' collected works - one page, or half a page, to a set. To bring together these pages involved locating the owners of the sets (245) and persuading them either to donate pages or to allow them to be photostated. At the same time, an intense effort was made to locate other Norris papers, through his friends and heirs of friends. The quest met with great success and The Bancroft Library, as a result, has become the largest single repository of Frank Norris material in the country.

Most outstanding of the accessions were the gifts from Frank Preston, the son of Janet Black, the novelist's widow, in May 1953 (designated the Janet Black Collection in her memory); from Kathleen Norris, widow of Charles G. Norris (Frank's brother), in September 1954; and from Dr. Frank Norris, son of Kathleen and Charles Norris, in June 1969. A list of the papers included in each of these gifts is appended to this report, although some of these items have since been removed for separate cataloging.

The source of items in the collection has been noted on the folders. Cards have been placed in the manuscripts catalog for the major correspondents. The key included with this report provides information about the arrangement of the collection. Books and other printed items which originally constituted part of this collection have been removed, in most cases, for separate cataloging.

Location of this collection:

UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library

University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library

Berkeley, CA 94720-6000, US

Contact:

510-642-6481

bancref-library@berkeley.edu

Website