[Hac-announce] June 2016 Book Discussion: "The Octopus" by Frank Norris

[Kevin Gough or Paula Jones]

Our book for June is The Octopus: A Story of California by Frank Norris. The discussion will take place Saturday, June 18, 2016 at 2 pm in the library of the Unitarian Society of New Haven at 700 Hartford Turnpike, Hamden.




 

>From Amazon:

Like the tentacles of an octopus, the tracks of the railroad reached out across California, as if to grasp everything of value in the state. Based on an actual, bloody dispute between wheat farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1880, The Octopus is a stunning novel of the waning days of the frontier West. To the tough-minded and self-reliant farmers, the monopolistic, land-grabbing railroad represented everything they despised: consolidation, organization, conformity. But Norris idealizes no one in this epic depiction of the volatile situation, for the farmers themselves ruthlessly exploited the land, and in their hunger for larger holdings they resorted to the same tactics used by the railroad: subversion, coercion and outright violence.

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.

Frank Norris (1870–1902) was an American novelist, during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His other notable work is McTeague, the basis for Erich von Stroheim's seminal film Greed. (The final sequences shot on location in Death Valley remain among the most powerful in the history of cinema.) His work influenced later socialist/progressive writers such as Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck. Like many of his contemporaries, he was profoundly affected by the advent of Evolution; Norris was particularly influenced by an optimistic strand of Evolutionary philosophy taught by Joseph LeConte, whom he studied under while at the University of California, Berkeley. This expresses itself in his novels through the theme of civilized man overcoming the inner "brute," his animalistic tendencies. Norris died tragically young at age 32 from a ruptured appendix.

The book is readily available in numerous libraries around the state.

Refreshments will be served. 









 

 













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