Financial History Issue 130 (Summer 2019) | Page 10

EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE
Frank Norris’s The Pit: An Unfinished Trilogy
By Brian Grinder and Dan Cooper
It was an enormous success, flying off
bookstore shelves before they could be
restocked. Some believe it inspired the
Parker Brothers card game called Pit. At
the very least, it helped the firm create its
biggest moneymaking product to date. It
was the basis for two Broadway plays, as
well as one of D.W. Griffith’s most impor-
tant silent films, A Corner in Wheat. 1
Serialization in The Saturday Evening Post
yielded a $3,000 windfall for young Frank
Norris and allowed him to finally make a
living as an author. But by the time The
Pit: A Story of Chicago was published in
January of 1903, Norris was dead.
Frank Norris, a native of Chicago, was
an author and journalist who covered the
Boer War in South Africa and the Span-
ish-American War in Cuba. He wanted
to make a living as a full-time author, and
although he came from a fairly well-to-do
family, he was forced to work part-time
as a manuscript reader for Doubleday,
Page and Company in order to make ends
meet. Norris’s earlier novels had done
well, but they never generated sufficient
royalties to allow him to devote himself
full time to writing.
Financial markets became an acceptable
literary topic in the late 19th century, as
those markets became more prominent and
began to affect the lives of those who were
not actively engaged in market activities.
Author Peter Knight argues that, “From
the 1880s onward…numerous novels, [and]
short stories… were less immediately con-
cerned with attacking the stock market than
making sense of it, rendering its mechanism
and patterns legible for their readers.”
How Norris hit on the idea of a wheat
trilogy is not known. One of his first men-
tions of it was in a March 1899 letter to
William Dean Howells: “My Idea is to
write three novels around the one subject
of Wheat. First, a story of California (the
producer); second, a story of Chicago (the
distributor); third, a story of Europe (the
consumer) and in each to keep to the idea
of this huge Niagara of wheat rolling from
Cover of the September 20, 1902 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, featuring Frank Norris’s The Pit.
West to East.”
Once the idea was approved at Double-
day, Norris immediately went to Califor-
nia to research the first part of the trilogy.
He spent a great deal of time researching
his trilogy novels. For The Octopus, he
went to California’s wheat country to
learn the ins and outs of farming, and he
interviewed Collis P. Huntington, head of
the Southern Pacific Railroad. Published
in 1901, The Octopus: A Story of California
8    FINANCIAL HISTORY  |  Summer 2019  | www.MoAF.org
chronicles the attempt of the fictional
Pacific and Southwestern Railroad to force
California wheat farmers off of railroad
land they had occupied and improved
hoping to eventually purchase their farms
from the railroad. Although it wasn’t a
best seller, The Octopus sold better than
any of Norris’s previous novels. Once
Norris finished The Octopus, he left Cali-
fornia for Chicago to begin research for
the second installment of the trilogy.