The Pit: a Story of Chicago

The Epic of the Wheat #2

by Frank Norris

In "The Octopus" (1901), one of the earliest muckraking novels of the Progressive Era, Frank Norris exposed the operations of the ruthless, "laissez-faire" capitalism sanctioned by turn-of-the-century Social Darwinists. "The Pit" (1903), the second novel in Norris's projected trilogy, continues the "Epic of the Wheat" with the story of Curtis Jadwin, a speculator bent on cornering the wheat market, and his brutally abused wife, Laura. Mingling realism and romanticism, Norris created in Laura a heroine whose psychological complexity rivals that of Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's "The Awakening." Edited for the first time as Norris intended it, this masterpiece of American literary naturalism is fully contextualized in the introduction and explanatory notes by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Gwendolyn Jones.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, American, Historical Fiction, 20th Century, Literature, Literary Fiction

244 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1903

About the author

Naturalistic novels of noted American writer Benjamin Franklin Norris, Junior, brother of Charles Gilman Norris and sister-in-law of Kathleen Thompson Norris, about American life include McTeague in 1899.

This novelist during the Progressive era predominantly authored works that include The Octopus: A California Story (1901) and The Pit (1903). Although he not openly supported socialism as a political system, his work nevertheless evinces a socialist mentality and influenced socialist-progressive writers, such as Upton Beall Sinclair. Philosophical defense of Thomas Henry Huxley of the advent of Darwinism profoundly influenced him like many of his contemporaries. Norris studied under Joseph LeConte, who at the University of California, Berkeley, taught an optimistic strand of Darwinist philosophy that particularly influenced him. Through many of his novels, notably McTeague, runs a preoccupation with the notion of the civilized man overcoming the inner "brute," his animalistic tendencies. His peculiar and often confused brand of social Darwinism also bears the influence of the early criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the French naturalist Émile Zola.

Reviews

[David Fulmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Pit is the second novel in Frank Norris’s Epic of the Wheat, an unfinished trilogy meant to portray the production, distribution, and consumption of a crop of American wheat. Norris only lived long enough to complete the first two novels in the trilogy but those two novels represent an important contribution to the effort to create an indigenous American Literature with subject matter, themes, and symbols drawn from American life.


The subtitle of this novel is ‘A Story of Chicago’ and it is at its finest in its depiction of that city around the time of the turn of the century. Detailed descriptions of the downtown financial district, opera at the Auditorium Building, artists’ studios, Lincoln Park, the busy river, the grain elevators and the railyards all are worked into the story of Curtis Jadwin, a real estate mogul who corners wheat by essentially buying up almost an entire crop in the trading pit of the Board of Trade, driving the price of wheat ever higher. The scenes of trading described in the novel, of brokers buying and selling futures contracts for bushels of wheat as a crowd looks on from the visitors’ gallery, are a truly vivid depiction of financial operations, something rarely portrayed in literature.


Jadwin’s story is one of building a great fortune almost overnight. It’s a kind of proto-American Dream tale, but his obsession with speculation and finance lead him to neglect his wife Laura, the other main character in this story. Her personality is split between her love for her husband and her natural sympathies toward a more artistic and aesthetic sense of life which is brought out in her relationship with the artist Sheldon Corthell. While her husband provides a cavernous home for her, complete with an art gallery and organ, there’s something inside her that isn’t satisfied and she’s stifled and miserable in her gilded cage.


But the most important character in the novel is wheat, the amber waves of grain that provide a livelihood to farmers and farming towns across so much of America and the crop that is the object of much of the trading in Chicago’s Board of Trade Building, though it only appears there in the form of small pouches of sample wheat that are scattered to pigeons waiting nearby after it has been inspected for quality. Norris spends pages characterizing the wheat as a natural force similar to a hurricane or earthquake that just is and cannot be resisted or avoided. It’s a tremendous allegorical symbol combining natural and man-made elements. And the theater in which all this wheat is bought and sold is the Board of Trade Building, “black, monolithic, crouching on its foundations like a monstrous sphinx with blind eyes, silent, grave,” a large temple devoted to trading the crop used by Norris to symbolize the unfeeling impersonal economic forces which were assuming ever greater power in American life at the time this novel was published.


Ultimately the wheat carries on. Beginning as a crop and the livelihood of farmers in The Octopus, here it is the object of speculation and finance by a businessman with the hubris to think that he could control it, if only briefly. The final volume of Norris’s trilogy was meant to show the consumption of American wheat in Europe and it would have bracketed Norris’s project as a work on the subject of globalisation, the economic links that exist around the world connecting diverse populations in a worldwide system of capital explored via the wheat trade.

At the conclusion both Jadwin and his wife Laura find redemption in loss and like many characters in American literature before and since they head west for a different life. But this novel is a dynamic portrait of the Chicago they leave, a rising city growing out of its midwestern origins to assume worldwide importance, busy with trade and industry but also stopping to go to the opera and appreciate the fine arts. And it’s that fully realized setting which makes this great novel come to life as an exciting American story.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second book of a projected trilogy by Frank Norris. From the front of the book:

The Trilogy of The Epic of the Wheat includes the following novels:

THE OCTOPUS, a Story of California.
THE PIT, a Story of Chicago.
THE WOLF, a Story of Europe.
These novels, while forming a series, will be in no way connected with each other save only in their relation to (1) the production, (2) the distribution, (3) the consumption of American wheat. When complete, they will form the story of a crop of wheat from the time of its sowing as seed in California to the time of its consumption as bread in a village of Western Europe.

The first novel, "The Octopus," deals with the war between the wheat grower and the Railroad Trust; the second, "The Pit," is the fictitious narrative of a "deal" in the Chicago wheat pit; while the third, "The Wolf," will probably have for its pivotal episode the relieving of a famine in an Old World community.

Unfortunately, Norris died before he could write the third book of the trilogy. I remember attempting to read The Octopus when I was in high school for an American lit class but I know I didn't get very far into it. However, I did read Norris' McTeague several years ago and thought it was one of the best novels of the time period around the turn of the 20th century. It told the story of a couple's courtship and marriage, and their subsequent descent into poverty, violence and finally murder as the result of jealousy and greed.

The Pit has some similar themes as McTeague including how greed can lead to self destruction and how it can ruin relationships. It was published in 1903 and takes place in Chicago. It centers on the life of Laura Dearborn and her eventual marriage to Curtis Jadwin who at first is a minor wheat speculator in the trading pits at the Chicago Board of Trade. But Jadwin becomes obsessed with speculating on the price of wheat and eventually makes millions. Laura is torn between three different suitors but marries Jadwin primarily for the security. The novel delves into her motivations which don't seem to really include love. The parts of the novel involving Laura and her love life were definitely dated and read like an early romance novel. However, as the story developed, and focused on the speculation of buying and selling wheat, it became quite engrossing. Toward the end of the novel there was a sequence in "The Pit" that was reminiscent of a prize boxing match with the Bears fighting the Bulls as the price of wheat rose and fell. Of course, the novel did not end happily for the Jadwins.

The novel was great in describing the Chicago of the time and the daily routine of the idle rich including attending the opera, reading the current novels, investing in art, etc. It also taught a lot about how the commodities market work and how greed and gambling in the market can affect the fortunes of both farmers and small investors while also making the price of the commodity out of reach for the poor. Overall I would recommend this one and now I need the read The Octopus.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is open to charges of being melodramatic, sentimental, didactic, and patriarchal, but in spite of all that it's a fascinating, engrossing, diverting read. Published in 1902, it is centered on the frenzied commodities market of Chicago, where men made giddy amounts of money or were smashed and ruined as they bought and sold wheat. But the central character is not a trader but young Laura Dearborn, a woman of means, intelligence, and spirit, who is admired by three men and enjoys flirting with them all. Who and how she chooses, and the impact on her marriage of Chicago bulls and bears, forms the stuff of the novel. I confess I rooted for a different ending than the one furnished, but I also enjoyed every page.

[Graceann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Please see my detailed review at Amazon Graceann's "The Pit" Review"

Frank Norris is such a compelling writer. This book was released in 1902, yet a remarkably small amount of the language is dated, and the message is as timely as ever. The crux of the story is on speculation in the wheat market in Chicago, but wheat could really be any commodity. Anyone who tried to make it big in the recent housing-boom-gone-bust will recognize a lot of attitudes here. I would love to know what Mr. Norris would have made of current trends in greed.

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was so compelling that I couldn't put it down, yet it frustrated me to death at the same time. I was so frustrated with Laura, yet I simply had to know what happened. Who was she going to pick-Corthell, Landry or Jadwin? Why was Jadwin spending so much time in the pit?

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW!!!!

[Kerry & naomi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had never heard of Frank Norris. I suppose he’s one of those authors consigned to the realms of scholarship and not much read outside of it, like a lot of advocacy fiction. Having served their turn as muckraking testimony during the Progressive Era, Norris’s novels, The Pit, and its predecessor, The Octopus, fell into obscurity (although the game, Pit, is based on the novel). Norris originally planned an epic trilogy about wheat: The Octopus set in California about the production of wheat; The Pit set in Chicago about the distribution of wheat through the stock market; and The Wolf, set in Europe about the consumption of wheat. Frank Norris died suddenly, at the age of 32, and The Pit was published posthumously; Norris had not yet begun to write The Wolf.

The Plot

Laura Dearborn, in possession of a small fortune, moves to Chicago to take up residence with her sister, Page, and their Aunt Wess in the late 19th century. Laura, a beautiful and intelligent woman, finds herself the object of affection of three suitors: Landry Court, Sheldon Corthell, and Curtis Jadwin. Landry Court is a young broker working in the wheat pit of the Chicago Board of Trade. His love for Laura seems more like boyish infatuation. Sheldon Corthell is an independently wealthy artist who designs stained glass windows. He appeals to Laura’s artistic sensibilities and her attraction to romantic ideals of love. Curtis Jadwin is a self-made real estate tycoon who falls in love with Laura and single-mindedly sets out to win her against all comers.

Laura, who has resolved to love no one, tells each of her suitors to leave her alone and that she is not in love with them, nor ever will be. Landry withdraws into his job; Corthell leaves for Europe; Jadwin appears in Laura’s drawing room the next afternoon and begins his suit in earnest. Eventually, Laura assents to marry him (don’t worry, this is not a spoiler).

The Jadwins are happy at first. They have plenty of money, a fine house, a small close circle of friends and their love for each other. Then Curtis, lured by the thrill of the stock market, begins to speculate in wheat futures. Soon his speculation, his gambling, takes him away from Laura more and more. Laura, a lonely, deserted wife, suddenly finds Sheldon Corthell returned from Europe and still in love with her.

The main thrust of the plot centers on Curtis’s dealings with the stock market. He’s lucky, he’s skilled, and then he decides to try to do what no one has done: to corner the market in wheat and set his own price. The monetary gain would be staggering. The loss would be ruinous. And the wheat will either bring about his destruction or his salvation.

Elements of Style

As an author, Norris is difficult to categorize. In his seven novels he seems to flip among realism, romanticism, and naturalism, and is often compared to Emile Zola for attempting to balance all three elements in his novels. The Pit is no exception. Norris moves the narrative between scenes of gritty realism in the wheat pit and Laura’s romantic idealism and yearning for love, whether watching an opera or moping about her palatial home. Norris peppers the narrative, especially Laura’s scenes, with literary, Biblical, and musical allusions. Some of the allusions are indicated with direct quotes in the text. Many more allusions would go undetected if the reader were not inclined to look for them. The text does have endnotes explaining the allusions that might not be readily apparent to the modern reader, however, the referenced passages are not indicated in the text itself with either a footnote superscript or asterisk. I don’t like to flip back and forth from the text to the notes anyway, so I preferred to only look in the endnotes when I spotted an allusion of which I was unsure. I missed a few as well, but I don’t think this materially detracted from the text.

What I would have liked to see in the endnotes, yet did not, were explanations of some of the technical terms of the stock market. After a while, one picks up on what “selling short” means or “covering margins” but Norris assumes his readers will be familiar with these and other terms, and, so it seems, do the editors at Penguin.

Frank Norris’s novel offers commentary on the ruthlessness of late 19th century capitalism and how the boom or bust of the economy has effects that ripple outward from their perpetrators in alarming ways. Norris also deals with issues of free will vs. circumstances as well as an addict’s thirst for the next thrill, the next insurmountable object to conquer.

Norris is, unfortunately, subject to the social constructs of his time and makes plenty of statements that presume women and men are “naturally” the way they are, stereotypes that the modern reader should spot easily. In this regard, Laura’s romantic role-playing in the narrative, particularly some of her dialogue, seems forced, but maybe that’s what Norris was going for. To his credit, Norris limits his description of female sexuality as monstrous to his description of the pit itself (seriously, male authors, what are you afraid of?).

Overall

The Pit was a runaway bestseller in the early 20th century and deserves new readership especially after more recent incidents on Wall Street, like insider trading. This book remains a classic because of its psychological look at the A-type personality and the pitfalls of the idea of romantic love while delving inside the machinations of wealthy, powerful people.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Norris’ usual themes: natural and social forces as fate; romance (love, art) vs reality (greed, business); hope lies in surrender of self.

[Christy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautiful and sensitive Laura Dearborn is being pursued by three men (although I don't know why since she is a self-absorbed and uninteresting). First, is Sheldon Corthell an artist who is separated from the world of commerce and capitalism and therefore understand women's hearts and desires. Second, is Landry Court a young businessman who is like a puppy in his adoration of Laura, but hardheaded and smart while involved in the wheat trade. And third is Curtis Jadwin, a 'man's man' who struggled to become one of the most influential and powerful real estate businessmen in Chicago.

Despite not being sure she has the constitution to be happy in marriage, Laura eventually succumbs to Jadwin’s persistent courting (it is not at all romantic given that he pursues her the same way he must have pursued juicy real estate properties) and agrees to marry him. While their marriage is comfortable, despite what Laura sees as her husband lack of cultural understanding and feeling, his growing involvement in wheat speculation thrusts serious strife into their relationship. As Laura beings to feel more and more abandoned by her husband, Sheldon Corthell reemerges in her life. Meanwhile, her husband business ventures totter on the precipice of destruction.

The first part of the book is a slog to get through, but things do start to pick up as Norris’ focuses on Jadwin’s obsession with the wheat market.

The ending of novel, however, is just about as unsatisfying as the rest of the story.

The Pit is an example of late 19th/early 20th century realism writing, so it’s not at all preachy. But at the same, it’s difficult to figure out if the author had any point at all he was trying to make.

[Henry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was pumped to start reading this, having been blown away by The Octopus,that truly epic work.

The Great American Novellist tacking turn of the century Chicago, that city burned in my mind with its vast south side slaughterhouse, capital of world commodity trading, railroad centre of the US, harshest winters, this was going to be America's Zola giving it to us straight to the guts.

The central character is a staggeringly beautiful, privileged, Massachusetts "debutante" coming to the city following death of the parents, and marrying the King Bull of the wheat speculators, a real estate magnate. The central point of the novel seemed to be about the dangers of narcissism within a relationship.

As narcissism leads to an overwhelming epidemic of relationship, personal, political dysfunctionality in our society today, this all read rather twee and sweet, a reminder of a more generous, mature age. And the REAL story of speculation, a City on the make, the one we really wanted to read was just a rather weak backdrop, used for metaphor. I smelt nothing of the streets in this one. Financial ruin was shown to be old men hanging about in rags, reading old papers in the offices, not the reality of starving, desparate people suffering abuse on the streets, as we got in The Octopus. It was not Zolaesque, this was poor man's Henry James.

[Catherine Mustread · Rating 4 out of 5]

Second and final book in a planned trilogy, curtailed because of the death of the author at the age of 32. Too bad, as I liked the second book, about the speculation involved in the Chicago commodities (wheat) market in the 1890s, more than I liked the first book which was about the corruption of the railroad in shipping wheat grown in California.

A good synopsis of this book can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit...

[jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

for three weeks, i couldn't help but think "omg just like The Pit" whenever i ate bread or pasta

[J M-B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This second novel of the planned but unfinished trilogy which Norris referred to as ‘the epic of the wheat’, turns from wheat production by the big ranchers around Guadalahara to the money men who speculate in wheat futures in the Chicago stock exchange - the pit of the title. The dominant figure of the pit is Curtis Jadwin, who corners the market and drives up the price, making some farmers rich and many poor people go without bread. Curtis Jadwin shares a common vice with Magnus Derrick, the big wheat rancher of ‘The Octopus’ - gambling. For Derrick it was poker, but for Jadwin it is the gamble of commodity speculation. His preoccupation with dealing in the pit is at the expense of his marriage to Laura who, unlike Blix (in the Norris novel published only a year or so prior to “The Pit”) is incapable of redeeming her gambling husband. The reader is alerted to the inevitable crash awaiting Jadwin when Laura’s attempt to interest him in improving literature evokes lukewarm interest to all offerings other than W D Howells’s “The Rise of Silas Lapham”. Laura is torn between her love for Curtis Jadwin and her attraction to Corthells, an artist and a former suitor who, with snigger-worthy symbolism, thrills her with his expert playing of the organ (Beethoven) which Jadwin can only play by means of some auto-mechanism similar to a piano roll. Laura accounts for her divided passions by telling herself that she is inhabited by two personae - one, the loyal wife with a taste for costumes and pedestrian art, and the other who gallops her horse recklessly fast and is ravished by the classics and Romanticism. In fact, neither one nor the other Laura is finally authentic and it is this inauthenticity that is presented as the explanation for her failure to win Jadwin from the Pit; their reconciliation is only finally achieved when Jadwin is reduced to sickness and both are condemned to the morally improving condition of (relative) poverty). Commodity production as a gamble, the wife as the spiritual correction to masculine worldliness are familiar themes for Norris but, in ‘The Pit’, they are represented without the wealth of references to Christian scripture found in both ‘Blix’ and ‘The Octopus’. In ‘The Pit’, speculation in wheat takes place at long remove from the idealized early cultivation of the Mission Fathers of “The Octopus” who planted “the first wheat, oil and wine to produce the elements of the sacrament” (‘The Octopus, p. 48). I read ‘The Pit’ in an execrable Amazon print on demand edition, lacking page numbers and chapter breaks as well as being replete with broken words, fractured paragraphs and the typographic absurdities that result from the poor software used to render the original text. Despite all that, it is good to have this book in circulation.

[Caroline Lakeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually didn’t hate this! But I also don’t think I’ll ever want to read a novel about the stock market again.

[Michael David · Rating 2 out of 5]

When this novel was launched in 1903, some critics thought that this was The Great American Novel. Clearly, they weren't able to read of Faulkner's Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! then, because I was vacillating between rating it either one or two.

It's not an impressive novel. The two protagonists, Laura and Curtis Jadwin, seem to have high-functioning schizophrenia over the course of the novel, because the novel seems to lack an identity. Norris was probably torn between being more scientific and in-depth with his Wheat Pit, or focusing on the love triangle among the protagonists and Corthell.

I was also recoiling from Norris's excessive use of adjectives and description: he made me feel nauseated with all the purple prose in the book. While Faulkner also tends toward august, ten-dollar words, he does better because he weaves his intricate description to his writing technique. In contrast, Norris seems to me to write a lot of words just because he could.

I ultimately think the novel was OK, though, simply because I am ambivalent toward it. Norris has a gift for description and characterization. I don't hate it like I hate Wuthering Heights, for example, but any prospective readers of this novel should note that this is NOT the Great American Novel at all.

The story is really quite simple: Laura Dearborn struggles to choose among the three men who court her, but ultimately decides on a comfortable life funded by the broker-turned-speculator Curtis Jadwin. After Jadwin samples speculating on wheat, he becomes addicted to it and slowly grows richer until it consumes him and destroys his life with Laura. Finally, because of his greed, he goes bankrupt, and they move to a new place and a new life.

I guess it's okay because I commiserated with both protagonists. But I was disappointed because the latter half of the novel has only this as its most memorable quote:

'wheat-wheat-wheat-wheat-wheat-wheat ...'

That's the reason why I made this image:



I only read this because I didn't want to throw it in the trash can. What's your excuse?

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This absorbing novel follows Laura Dearborn, a well-to-do young woman recently come to Chicago, as she commences wedded life against a background of wheat speculating at the Board of Trade.

"The Pit" is the second saga in Norris' unfinished "Trilogy of The Epic of the Wheat." The cycle begins with "The Octopus," an otherwise unrelated novel that covers disputes between wheat growers and a railway trust in California. (Norris died before he started the third book, which was to cover wheat as bread relieving famine in Europe.)

Laura Dearborn is a rather tiresome, stupid woman, but Norris describes her world enthrallingly, and his business scenes — loosely based on the young Chicago tycoon Joseph Leiter's 1890s corner on the wheat market — make the clashes between Bulls and Bears surprisingly thrilling.

While some legal and technical changes in trading have occured since the turn of the 20th century and the CBOT's historic trading floor has been demolished, the basics remain the same today as in Norris' day, a hundred years ago:

"Think of it, the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade. They make the price. They say just how much the peasant shall pay for his loaf of bread. If he can't pay the price he simply starves. And as for the farmer, why it's ludicrous. If I build a house and offer it for sale, I put my own price on it, and if the price offered don't suit me I don't sell. But if I go out here in Iowa and raise a crop of wheat, I've got to sell it, whether I want to or not, at the figure named by some fellows in Chicago. And to make themselves rich, they may make me sell it at a price that bankrupts me."

[Bre Teschendorf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this novel and learned a lot from it about the wheat trade in the United States during the turn of the century. It was fascinating and opened up a world of ideas for me, hither to unknown.

Furthermore, I liked the 'moral' of the story and thought that the author proved very well the everlasting truth, "All is meaningless under the sun..." without having to come right out and say it.

I found the main character of the book Laura Jadwin nee Dearborn at times endearing, at times disgusting, and still at other times fascinating and wonderful.

I understand that Frank Norris is a "naturalist" writer. I do not understand very much about the genre of writing, so I am not really qualified to comment on his use of naturalism. However if I do grasp a little bit of what this means, I feel that he used the style well in his development of the different personalities in the book and this added depth to a story that might have been shallow.

I understand that this book has been much criticized for its mixture of a love story and business story. Personally, I thought that it was not too far fetched, surely every hard working man also hopes of a wife. This was an honest look at the possible results of over working and greed on personal life.

I did skip some paragraphs describing the weather, the city of Chicago, the park.....

Finally, Frank Norris has also been accused of being antisemitic. I have not read his other books, where this is apparently more blatant, however, in reading this book it was clear to me that he is antisemitic and that (tiny) part of the novel did anger me.

[Sarah Beaudoin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Pit is the second book in Frank Norris' planned trilogy on the wheat lifecycle during the earliest years of the 20th century. The first book, The Octopus was an epic on the experiences of Western wheat farmers, and it really blew me away. By comparison, The Pit was a let-down. It is set in Chicago and follows the process of wheat through the Chicago Board of Trade. Actual wheat features little in the book (in fact, in one of its few appearances, Norris has a bit of brilliance with spilled wheat that goes unnoticed by the novel's characters) but Norris does a great job of demonstrating the hazards of wheat speculation. We see obsession, huge deals, deals that break lives and families, and so much money changing hands that it's hard to follow. The problem with The Pit though is the actual story. Whereas The Octopus had a strong narrative independent of the wheat, The Pit does not. The characters are mostly flat and two dimensional (with the exception of a clearly OCD aunt and the barely described Landry Court), and the plot itself is predictable and at times, onerous. The Pit was intended more as an expose than a work of literature, but that doesn't mean that the literature part should just be dismissed. Upton Sinclair taught us with The Jungle that you can accomplish both in one work, as did Norris himself with The Octopus.

[Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the second book in Norris's The Wheat Trilogy, the first being The Octopus. The third was never finished due to Norris's untimely death.

Though written in 1903, I would consider this a "modern" novel. Superficially it is a story about obsession—obsession with acquiring wealth and power through investing in grain futures on the Chicago Grain Exchange, known as The Pit. But beneath the surface it is a story about love, and what love means to the central characters in the story. It goes into psychological intimacy, companionship, and extramarital love. Each character has different expectations of the relationship that love brings about, and to a certain degree it is selfish in that they can only see the benefit to those that are loved, not those who are doing the loving.

It is also a story about man's powerlessness over nature. Nature, in the sense of weather, but also nature in the sense of the market. In the end it is the wheat itself that destroys the man.

It is also a story about business versus art. Business is brutal, immoral, hardening, and essentially masculine. Art is beauty, wonder, elegance, and essentially feminine. Different characters personify the two worlds. We learn that wealth makes art possible,, and that art can be an escape, but there must be a balance.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an oil trader for the past 30 years, I found this novel had incredible relevance. Especially in one part where the trader got so confident he let his "hedges" expire. The volatility and swings in markets, panicked traders, limit up/limit down, squeezes, shorts ... it's no accident that grain and precious metals were the original commodities. Oil came a lot later. But in many ways, it's all the same. It's all about supply, shorts vs longs and, of course, money. Norris really gets into the psyche and insanity of commodity trading here, applying his novelist's keen eye. I read somewhere that this novel was actually unfinished .. but I thought it was still a great read.

Norris died young. He wrote an epic book The Octopus, but it is a tragedy that he is not more widely read.

A truly gifted writer, a Naturalist from the school of Zola who saw what greed and the drive for power did to people and society.

[L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This could be considered a precursor to chick-lit as (male) author Frank Norris just loved describing what Laura Dearborn was wearing and how she arranged her hair.

Laura has moved to the center of the universe (known as Chicago) to lead a charmed life. She's got servants. Anybody who has servants has a charmed life in my opinion. Anyway, in between all the parties and operas and such, Laura has three men courting her. Decisions, decisions. Who will Laura pick? The rich guy, obviously, as Laura is high maintenance. But the money has to come from somewhere and in this case it comes from the buying and selling of wheat. Not only the wheat that does exist but also the wheat that may exist in the future.

Look, I don't understand the stock market so all that buying and selling and booming and busting didn't have me all excited and breathless, but it may you if that's your thing, you wolves of Wall Street.

[Humphrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Pit is a satisfactory novel. Its greatest fault, alas, is that it is the sequel to the much more fully realized The Octopus. Perhaps it's because we get a bit less of the economics this time around (in exchange for more high society); perhaps it's because there are fewer major characters, making for a less diverse range of perspectives/positions; perhaps it's just that the pacing doesn't quite click. Probably it's all three. There are still, of course, some interesting themes in the novel - even a few that aren't already found in its predecessor. At any rate, coming from The Octopus, this is a bit of a letdown: I'd suggest reading this novel first instead.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is about people who speculated heavily in the Chicago wheat-trade market in the early 20th century. And since no book would be worth reading without ROMANCE (or else humor), there's a good deal of that, too. I liked the way this book brought me back to my Midwest roots. I liked the author's pervasive use of symbolism and metaphor. There was so much of human nature to think about while reading this book, that maybe I understand myself or this race a little better. I would have never picked up this book had it not been assigned for a class, but I'm glad I read it.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank Norris is my favorite American author from the late 19th/early 20th century. It's a shame he died so young. This novel was particularly interesting to me because it's based in Chicago and the main character is a futures trader at the Chicago Board of Trade in the early 1900s. This was part of his "Trilogy of the Wheat", along with "The Octopus", and unfortunately he died before finishing what would have been the third novel, which was to be set in Europe. The idea was following the commodity from production to hedging to use.

[Brenda Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the story, set in the 1880s, of a marriage put under great strain by speculation on the wheat market. The omniscient point of view focuses heavily on Laura's thoughts, and it was apparently one of the first books to frankly depict a woman's desires, but I didn't find Laura very believable or sympathetic. She sounded like some man's ideal woman, and I wasn't happy with the choice she makes at the end. However, the novel raises a number of problems caused by speculating on food products like wheat and helped me understand the way the commodities market functions.

[David Arthur · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Pit: A Story of Chicago (The Epic of Wheat) by Frank Norris (1870-1902), edited with an introduction and notes by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Gwendolyn Jones, Penguin Books, 1994 was first published in early 1903. Was Frank Norris the Emile Zola of America? If not with the six novels, numerous stories, and essays on writing, over less than a decade, under his belt before his untimely death at age 32, that was his acknowledged intent and the result of his upbringing, his marriage, and his research and plan for his trilogy of wheat, from the west coast, in the Octopus, followed by the Pit, in Chicago, and the planned one in set in Europe, West to East, producer, distributor, and consumer. The books were planned and the two written, were very much stories of their own, perhaps, only with the elemental “wheat, wheat, wheat.” Continually resounding in the story centered in Chicago, much like the windy, wet, and temperate weather generated by the lake, and by the social-geographic concentration of transport and processing/ storage centered in Chicago, well connected by water and rail transport to the rest of the nation and to the world. That centers of wheat production and processing/ distribution existed in Argentina and the Ukraine is explicitly repeated, in The Pit. Also too, is the notion of constrained free will, subjected to assumed reason, but romantically and emotionally charged by personal need, gambling on assumed good fate, and an ultimate sacrifice to personal needs and throwing whim, disguised as reason and social convention, to the judgement of elemental fate.
Norris’s mother and father, plus his spouse are primary models for Laura and Curtis Jadwin, wife and husband. Laura id a multi-faceted composite of Norris’s scorned mother (divorced by Frank’s father) and Frank Norris’s more modern and forward-looking wife, very much his helpful partner in his literary career and in his research. Curtis’s rags-to-riches rise is a model of a speculator of the time who cornered a futures trading market, but that speculator was started with a silver spoon in his mouth, in an initial capital, from the speculator’s father. Norris also was schooled in the mechanics of futures trading in New York.
Romantic naturalism, a sort of realism topped with more than the everyday facts and details (much of, especially in futures trading is technically detailed, and, admittedly boring to anyone not a speculator or an economist) is a way to see the forces, elemental only in the fact that, while individuals are operating, people in combination, as a sort of super-organism, are acting as a force of nature, making food, transporting, and preparing it (The Octopus and illustrated in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle—a view of that industrial preparation from the working class perspective, often literally looking at the sort of palaces that the Jadwin’s and other lived in, along the lake), distributing it, literally around a world consuming table. Individually and mechanically, that is a complex task, with many hands, and many super-organistic generated forces. How much should each stage cost, and how much can those at each stage profit, who wins more and loses more, how far can imbalances last and how are imbalances returned toward balance—if ever?
“And all those millions and millions of bushels of Wheat were gone now. The Wheat that had killed Cressler, that had ingulfed Jadwin’s fortune and all but unseated reason itself; the Wheat that had intervened like a great torrent to drag her husband from her side and drown him in the roaring vortices of the Pit, had passed on, resistless, along its ordered and predetermined courses from West to east, like a vast Titanic flood, had passed, leaving Death and Ruin in its wake, but bearing Life and Prosperity to the crowded cities and certres of Europe.
For a moment, vague dark perplexities assailed her, questioning as to the elemental forces, the forces of demand and supply that ruled the world. This huge resistless Nourisher of the Nations—why was it that it could not reach the People, could not fulfill its destiny, unmarred by all this suffering, unattended by all this misery?
She did not know…
…She turned to her husband, an exclamation upon her lips; but Jadwin, by the dim light of the carriage lanterns, was studying a railroad folder…”
My God, they are now, heading West, their fortune gone, but is their success going to happen next time. The octopus in the first wheat novel, The Octopus, is the manipulative, land acquisitive, another cornering force, the railroad, and its’ commanding economic villain.
But it is still a stage, a set of man-made structures and inherent institutions, and the stage is windy, rainy, snowy Chicago.
“And this was the last impression of the part of her life that that day brought to a close; the tall gray office buildings, the murk of rain, the haze of light in the heavens, and raised against it, the pile of the Board of Trade building, black, monolithic, crouching on its foundations like a monstrous sphinx with blind eyes, silent, grave—crouching there without a sound, without sign of life, under the night and the drifting veil of rain.”
Norris passed through the language of Emile Zola here, meanwhile picking up on the lower depths of Dante Alghieri’s The Divine Comedy and passing through the Shakespearean stage. The curtain is down, but its wet, and what is that wind still blowing and that glow still glowing behind?
https://youtu.be/LdJ1aGC-izQ?si=-2Ai6...

[Ben Iverson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book all about how your career can take over your life if you aren't careful. It was especially interesting to me because it is all about "the pit," which is the Chicago Board of Trade (like the game of the same title). There's something very compelling, competitive, and consuming about betting on trades in the market. This book tells the story of how the Pit almost ruined a man and his wife. It made me think about my career choices and what I really want in life.

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this story. It had a business aspect to it, as well as a more domestic one as it traces the story of Laura as she moves to Chicago. she marries Jadwin, a successful Chicagoian, and the story follows her maturation set up against her new husband's degeneration (through is obsession with the wheat market). It gives a great look into Chicago, but an even better look into the Pit where stock is bought and sold, cornered and lost, and where people are changed.

[Topher · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Norris's The Octopus made me love literary naturalism, The Pit starts far too slowly, and Norris spends too much time writing parlor drama - something which he struggles with. The second half shifts the focus to the actual trading, and here Norris's brilliant grasp of naturalism can really shine. The book redeems itself enough that it is a great shame that the last book of the Epic of the Wheat was never finished.

[Judy P. Sprout · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason I thought this was going to be a book about poor people in Chicago, but it was a book about rich people in Chicago. So yeah, my second book in as many weeks about commodities exchanges & stock markets. But this time wheat, not railways.

Blah blah short sales. Blah blah margin calls. Once again I have no idea why I get into this shit.

Do you want to know why we have regulation? This is why we have regulation.

Contains 0% Octopus.