McTeague: A Story of San Francisco: An Authoritative Text- Backgrounds and Sources- Criticism - Hardcover

Fiction

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393044602 ISBN 13: 9780393044607

Publisher: Norton

Synopsis

This graphic depiction of urban American life centers around McTeague, a dentist practicing in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. While at first content with his life and friendship with an ambitious man named Marcus, McTeague eventually courts and marries Trina, a parsimonious young woman who wins a large sum of money in a lottery. The greed of the majority of the characters in the novel creates a chain of events that lead to many painful, gruesome deaths. Norris’ work, so strikingly different from that of his contemporaries, is an admirable example of social realism, which provided America with a shocking reflection of its sordid sense of survival. From the opening description of San Francisco to McTeague’s final desperate flight far from his ‘Dental Parlors,’ this novel examines human greed in a way that still causes readers to pause and reflect over one hundred years later.

About this title

Review:

One of the great works of the modern American imagination. Alfred Kazin " -One of the great works of the modern American imagination.---Alfred Kazin "One of the great works of the modern American imagination."--Alfred Kazin

About the Author:

Donald Pizer is Pierce Butler Professor of English Emeritus at Tulane University. He is the author of The Novels of Theodore Dreiser, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism, and The Novels of Frank Norris, among others.

About this edition

• Publisher: Norton
• ISBN 10: 0393044602
• ISBN 13: 9780393044607
• Binding: Hardcover