The Pit: A Story of Chicago

In "The Octopus" (1901), one of the earliest muckraking novels of the Progressive Era, Frank Norris exposed the operations of the ruthless, "laissez-faire" capitalism sanctioned by turn-of-the-century Social Darwinists. "The Pit" (1903), the second novel in Norris's projected trilogy, continues the "Epic of the Wheat" with the story of Curtis Jadwin, a speculator bent on cornering the wheat market, and his brutally abused wife, Laura. Mingling realism and romanticism, Norris created in Laura a heroine whose psychological complexity rivals that of Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's "The Awakening." Edited for the first time as Norris intended it, this masterpiece of American literary naturalism is fully contextualized in the introduction and explanatory notes by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Gwendolyn Jones.