McTeague

A dentist practicing without a license on Polk Street, the wife who wins five thousand dollars in a lottery and then will not spend a cent of it, and the friend who introduced them and wants the money back. Norris had studied art in Paris and set out to write an American Zola; he died at thirty-two of a burst appendix. Nothing in the book is symbolic: the gold is gold, the teeth are teeth, and the arithmetic is exact. Fifty-seven plates by Courbet and Daumier, among others, show the hard landscapes and sharper social scenes that Norris's San Francisco shares with nineteenth-century French painting.