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Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed

The Octopus: A Story of California

by Frank Norris

1901

Novel

Historical, Western

Frank Norris was the first American novelist to follow in the footsteps of Emile Zola's revolutionary sociological realism. This novel and its 1903 sequel, The Pit dramatized the economic mechanisms of inequality and the corporate structure that justifies repression.

The primary novel in an uncompleted, projected trilogy (The Epic of Wheat) this 1901 novel depicts the struggle of farmers in California to produce wheat while opposing the monopolistic machinations of the railroad industry. Presley, a poet from the East, visits Magnus Derrick's family in the San Joaquin Valley where farmers have leased lands from the railroad, and meets several disgruntled ranchers. He discovers that since the farmers have improved the land, the railroad plans to reclaim the land they have leased, with the aim to monopolize the wheat industry, then the beef industry. The railroad enjoys complete political control of the state, as well as the support of newspapers.

After a train kills sheep on the tracks, Annixter, whose broken fence was responsible for the accident, organizes farmers in a league against the railroad. A veteran engineer for the railroad, Dyke, quits his job rather than accept a pay cut; he farms, but goes bankrupt due to a hike in freight rates. He robs a train, is apprehended, sentenced to life in jail. Lowering his literary ambition, Presley composes a popular political ballad, “The Toilers,” to support the farmers, but realizes that poetry is useless in the political arena.

The farmers' league place Magnus' son, Lyman Derrick, a corrupt San Francisco lawyer, on the state commission, but he betrays the farmers and orders them evicted. In armed resistance many farmers, including the heroic Annixter, are killed in a bloodbath. Sunk in poverty and humiliated, Magnus is a broken man. His wife manages to find a job teaching.

The evil antagonist, Behrman, who manages the railroad, dies ironically from a loading accident, when his foot, caught in a rope, drags him to be smothered under bags of wheat he had dishonestly acquired. Presley visits the railroad president, an urbane and civilized man who espouses modern laws of economic progress. Lyman Derrick's election as state governor appears likely. Presley departs for India.

Although the octopus-like railroad has been victorious, the novel concludes with a tongue-in-cheek moral addendum: greed and injustice is short-lived, that from a larger perspective truth and progress will eventually triumph.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Norris, Frank. "The Octopus: A Story Of California." Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=6CR_0372.
APA 7th
Norris, F. (2015). The Octopus: A Story of California. In E. Salem Press (Ed.), Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Norris, Frank. "The Octopus: A Story Of California." Edited by Editors of Salem Press. Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.