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.

Greed is a legendary film begun in 1923. It was to have been Erich von Stroheim's masterwork, but his colossal ambitions were to be his undoing. His obsession with realistic detail and determination to extract every ounce of drama from his source, Frank Norris's novel McTeague, stretched the shooting schedule to inordinate lengths, resulting in a film which ran for over seven hours. Jonathan Rosenbaum has made a meticulous study of all the sources. In a fascinating piece of detective work, he reconstructs the history of one of cinema's greatest ruins.

McTeague: A Story of San Francisco by Frank Norris

When housewife Trina McTeague wins the lottery, her comfortable life with her dentist husband, John, is slowly destroyed, in part by her own increasing paranoia and in part by the machinations of a villainous friend, Marcus. Director Erich von Stroheim shot the film, based on the Frank Norris novel "McTeague", on location in and around San Francisco, an extravagance unheard of in the 1920s. His original version, since lost, ran for nearly 10 hours.

McTeague is a novel by Frank Norris, first published in 1899. It tells 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 book was the basis for the films McTeague (1916), Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1924), and Slow Burn (2000). It was also adapted as an opera by William Bolcom in 1992.

A novel by Benjamin Franklin Norris who was an American novelist, during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. Although he did not support socialism as a political system, his work nevertheless has evinced a socialist mentality and influenced socialist/progressive writers such as Upton Sinclair. Like many of his contemporaries, he was profoundly influenced by the advent of Darwinism, and Thomas Henry Huxley's philosophical defense of it. Through many of his novels, notably McTeague (1899), 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.

Born in Chicago in 1870, Frank Norris led a life of adventure and art. He moved to San Francisco at fifteen, spent two years in Paris painting, and returned to San Francisco to become an internationally famous author. He died at age thirty-two from a ruptured appendix. During his short life, he wrote an inspired series of novels about the United States coming of age. The Octopus was a prescient warning about the threat of monopolies, and The Pit exposed the intrigues and dirty dealings at the Chicago grain exchange. Extensively reprinted, Norris's works have also found their way into popular consciousness through film (Erich von Stroheim's Greed), and even an opera based on his portrait of the huge, dumb, and murderous dentist, McTeague.Interest in this dynamic writer was wide and sustained, but Frank Norris and his family did biographers no favours. Norris burned most of his correspondence, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire devoured more, and his brother and widow dispersed his surviving papers as gifts. As a result, it was thought impossible to assemble enough material to surpass the single existing biography, published in 1932. Authors Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse S. Crisler, acknowledged as the leading experts on Norris, have spent have spent over thirty years overcoming these obstacles, devotedly amassing the material necessary to at last fashion a truly full-scale portrait of the artist. Anyone familiar with the breezier existing accounts of the man and hungering for the real story will agree that Frank Norris, A Life was worth the wait.