Antisemitism
Norris has been characterized as an antisemitic writer. In the words of Richard Levi:
...literary scholars have overlooked the strenuous antisemitism in his most successful novels. Norris's derogation of Jews presented a more invasive and menacing image than Henry Adams's elite and snobbish eastern intellectual antisemitism or Ignatius Donnelley's derisive populist sketch of a Jewish money lender in Caeser's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (1890). As villains in Norris's mug book, Zerko in McTeague (1899) and Behrman in The Octopus (1901) were toxic agents in nature itself, a death force brutalizing California's urban and agrarian scene.These brute devils, lurking in the nature of everyman and prepared to corrupt Anglo-Saxon Christian civilization, transcended the conventional Jewish stereotypes of Shylock and Christ killers.
Read more about this topic: Frank Norris
Famous quotes containing the word antisemitism:
“Worst of all, there is no sign of any relaxation of antisemitism. Logically it has nothing to do with Fascism. But the human race is imitative rather than logical; and as Fascism spreads antisemitism spreads.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)