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But Laura, preoccupied with looking for the Cresslers, hardly listened. Aunt Wess', whose count was confused by all these figures murmured just behind her, began over again, her lips silently forming the words, "sixty-one, sixty-two, and two is sixty-four." Behind them the voice continued....

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In The Octopus(1901), one of the earliest muckraking novels of the Progressive Era, Frank Norris exposed the operations of the ruthless, laissez-faire capitalism sanctioned by turn-of-the-century Social Darwinists. The Pit(1903), the second novel in Norris's projected trilogy, continues the "Epic of the Wheat" with the story of Curtis Jadwin, a speculator bent on cornering the wheat market, and his brutally abused wife, Laura. Mingling realism and romanticism, Norris created in Laura a heroine whose psychological complexity rivals that of Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening.