Moran of the Lady Letty: A Story of Adventure Off the California Coast

Frank Norris

1898年1月 · Doubleday & McClure Company

關於這本電子書

Ross Wilber went to the docks to meet a friend. There he made the mistake of accepting a drink from a friendly sailor. He never dreamed that he- a member of San Francisco's high society-could end up drugged, sold to an unscrupulous captain, and shipped off for the Orient . . . in a word, shanghaied! By a series of strange twists of fate, his new-found employment proves anything but drudgery . . . between a derelict ship, a mutiny, and a female sailor named Moran, his adventures off the California coast are nothing short of extraordinary!

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Considered one of the leading pioneers in American Naturalism, Frank Norris is read and studied for his vivid and honest depiction of life at the beginning of a lusty and developing new century. Born in Chicago, he moved to San Francisco with his well-to-do family when he was 14 and went on to attend the University of California and Harvard University before becoming a war correspondent in South Africa and Cuba. His early apprentice work consisted mostly of rather unremarkable adventure stories, but with the long-gestating McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), he struck a new note. That powerful study of avarice in a seedy section of the Bay Area may well be Norris's masterpiece. The Octopus (1901), the first of Norris's projected Epic of the Wheat series, deals with the raising of wheat in California and the struggle of ranchers against the railroads, while The Pit (1903) is a novel about speculation on the Chicago wheat exchange. Unfortunately, Norris died suddenly after an operation for appendicitis. Like Stephen Crane, a writer with whom Norris is frequently compared, Norris died too young to fulfill his considerable promise, but he has more than held his own ground among turn-of-the-century writers whose works have lived. One reason may be that he took his craft as a writer seriously, as is shown by his posthumously published Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays (1903) and The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, edited by Donald Pizer.