The Octopus: A Story of California

In the San Joaquin Valley of California in the 1880s, wheat farmers led by the proud rancher Magnus Derrick have built prosperous ranches on land they expected to buy cheaply from the railroad, which controls freight rates, politicians and newspapers like an octopus. When the railroad raises the price of the land and sends marshals to evict them, the conflict ends in bloodshed. A young poet, Presley, who has come to write an epic of the West, watches it all.

Frank Norris published the novel in 1901, basing it on the real Mussel Slough tragedy of 1880, when settlers were killed in a land dispute with the Southern Pacific Railroad. It is a powerful work of American naturalism. Compare Norris's McTeague and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.