McTeague is an enormously strong but dim-witted former miner now working as a dentist in San Francisco towards the end of the nineteenth century. He falls in love with Trina, one of his patients, and shortly after their engagement she wins a large sum in a lottery. All is well until McTeague is betrayed and they fall into a life of increasing poverty and degradation. This novel is often presented as an example of American naturalism where the behavior and experience of characters are constrained by “nature”—both their own heredity nature, and the broader social environment. McTeague was published in 1899 as the first of Norris’s major novels.

It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors' coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.

Excerpt from McTeague: A Story of San Francisco To act, sluggish. Yet there was nothing vicious about the man. Altogether he suggested the draught horse, immensely strong. Stupid, docile, obedient. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Although otherwise ignorant and ineffectual, McTeague has managed to eke out a meager career as an unlicensed dentist. His dreary existence rapidly improves upon meeting and marrying Trina, whose possession of a winning lottery ticket further brightens their lives. But Trina's lust for money and parsimonious habits arouse a latent brutishness in her husband, as the couple’s happiness gradually curdles into a quagmire of suspicion, jealousy, and corruption. Inspired by a real-life crime that the San Francisco tabloids eagerly exploited, McTeague created a literary sensation upon its initial 1899 publication. Frank Norris's riveting depiction of avarice and moral degeneration ranks among the earliest works in American literature to offer a compelling, realistic view of human nature at its most basic level. Critic Alfred Kazin praised the novel as "one of the great works of the modern American imagination," and it was the inspiration for Erich von Stroheim's groundbreaking 1924 silent film, Greed.

Inspired by an actual crime sensationalized in the San Francisco press at the turn of the century, this riveting tale of avarice, degeneration, and death chronicles the demise of an ignorant charlatan and his avaricious wife. A compelling, realistic view of human nature at its most basic level.