Wheat ranchers against the railroad that owns the tracks, the rates, and the land underneath them.

The Octopus: A Story of California

Frank Norris · 1901

Norris published The Octopus in 1901 as the first volume of a planned trilogy about American wheat, fictionalizing a real 1880 gun battle between San Joaquin Valley ranchers and the Southern Pacific Railroad. It is one of the founding texts of American literary naturalism — a mode that treats economic and natural forces (the railroad monopoly, the wheat crop itself) as closer to weather than to villainy, indifferent to the individual lives caught underneath them. Norris's ranchers are proud, flawed, and largely powerless against a corporation that owns the freight rates and, eventually, the land titles too — a story about monopoly power that reads uncomfortably current.

16 chapters · 195,671 words · ~14.8 hr read