Rejected by nineteenth-century publishers for its sordid and shocking subject matter, Vandover and the Brute is a powerful novel of turn-of-the-century San Francisco. Benjamin Franklin Norris, Jr. (March 5, 1870 - October 25, 1902) was an American journalist and sometime novelist during the Progressive Era, whose fiction was predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), and The Pit (1903).