The Octopus: A Story of California

Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus: A Story of California was published in 1901, 21 years after the event it fictionalizes; the Mussel Slough Tragedy resulted from a dispute between settlers and the Southern Pacific Railroad that left seven people dead. The dispute arose over land titles, owned by the Southern Pacific, for land that had been developed by settlers who believed the Railroad would sell them the leased land for its pre-development prices. After the Supreme Court ruled against the settlers, the Railroad attempted to evict those who wouldn’t pay its elevated prices, and on May 11, 1880, a group of aggrieved settlers intercepted a U.S. Marshal and three Railroad agents. The confrontation resulted in the Mussel Slough Tragedy.

Today, Norris is known as one of the originating voices of American Naturalism, with his literary fame hanging on three novels: McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), published after his death at the age of 32. McTeague gained Norris wider recognition as a novelist, and he set out to write a trilogy of novels charting the growth, brokerage and distribution, and eventual consumption of wheat; he wanted to call this The

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