Product Description

This is a portrait of the downfall of a slow-minded dentist and his avaricious wife, which embodies the author's powerful insights into the conflicting forces of heredity and social conditioning.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #224949 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

About the Author
The editor of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in World's Classics, Frank Norris is Professor of English at Texas A & M University.

Customer Reviews

McTeague is a prophetic masterpiece!
McTeague is one of the greatest works of "classic American literature" I have ever read. Frank Norris was a genius at being able to size up the inhumanity of humanity & roll it all up in one great big nasty ball of literature that packs a punch that will knock you on your bum! McTeague is an uncaring brute who knows not the chaos that he creates. His wife is a gullible victim with a heart of gold. His best friend is ready to steal away his most prized posession. To top it all off is an ending for the ages that will leave one of the most stark, naked pictures presented in all of literature's annals. Many people will not enjoy McTeague because of the sheer brutality & the negative, crushing tone of the novel. For those of you who don't need rainbows & unicorns in a novel, I have a feeling you'll be absolutely thrilled by this American masterpiece.

A forgotten masterpiece.
I first saw the silent film 'Greed' (1924) and was moved by the superb acting in it. I wanted to read the novel but had expected it to be unlike the film. How wrong I was! The novel turned out to be as good as the film itself. Based on the downfall of a dentist and his wife, the novel explores the weakness of human desire for money and how people can change from being ordinary into savages. No wonder the novel was considered 'shocking' when it was published in 1899 but it has survived the passages of time into becoming a icon of human weakness. You will be absorbed into the world of the dentist McTeague and the San Francisco before the great earthquake of the 1900's into his untimely end. Buy it!

As dangerous as a Comanche attack, and somber as steam beer.
The Norris novel stuns the senses. It is the Cadillac of ingenuity. drama vs. rest. the rest, and the rest...descriptive and natural. one of the few books to captivate so well with a slow, sleepy head hero. one that starts out different, but is turned like the rest, violent and vengeful, illogical. and then raging, crying. like a wounded beast.

and Norris uses repetition and the placement of vastness to dig the graves of the vulgar people that inhabit the novel's space.

repition, crossed by the unexpected.