Summary:

Posthumously published in 1914, Vandover and the Brute is probably
Frank Norris's first complete novel, much of it written when he was a
student at Harvard in 1894-1895. The subject matter made it
unacceptable to turn-of-the-century taste, and when the book finally
did appear one reviewer declared that "it ought to have been issued
for private circulation only" (Bookman). The setting of the story is
San Francisco in the 1890s. Vandover, fresh out of college and the
son of a wealthy owner of slum properties, has dreams of being an
artist but lacks the discipline to fulfill them. His seduction of a
young woman results in her suicide and the death of his own father.
Cheated by false friends of part of his patrimony, Vandover gambles
away the rest. Finally, as Warren French writes in Frank Norris, "he
becomes a bum reduced to cleaning the offal from the slum houses he
once owned. His degeneration has also been marked by attacks of
lycanthropy, during which he pads around on all fours, naked, howling
like a wolf."Although present-day critics would agree with one of the
few favorable early judgments—that "it is a first novel of which any
writer might be proud" (Boston Transcript)—Vandover and the Brute has
yet to be established in its proper place in American fiction. Warren
French's introduction points out that while the novel is usually
considered as an early, unrevised example of American naturalism, it
needs to be seen now as a principal example of a "decadent"
literature that flourished briefly in the United States in the 1890s
as the influence of the genteel tradition was collapsing. It presents
the portrait of an artistic young man comparable to the portrait of a
young matron in Kate Chopin's now much discussed novel The Awakening.

Classification:

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Dewey Class: 813 -- Fiction

Book Details:

Physical Description: 6.0"x9.0"x0.5"; 0.6 lb; 188 pages
Edition Info: Paperback; 2006-11-15

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Subjects:

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•	Literature & Fiction -- Contemporary (83036)
•	Literature & Fiction -- General AAS (37858)
•	Literature & Fiction -- General -- General AAS (5305)
•	Literature & Fiction -- Literary (43482)

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