McTeague: A Story of San Francisco

by Frank Norris

Category: Fiction

Status: Available

Source: Public Domain — Project Gutenberg

About This Book

"McTeague: A Story of San Francisco" by Frank Norris is a novel published in 1899. It follows a San Francisco dentist and his wife as their marriage disintegrates into violence and tragedy, driven by jealousy, greed, and obsession with money. When McTeague loses his dental practice through betrayal, the couple descends into poverty while his wife's miserly hoarding intensifies. Their story builds toward a devastating climax in the desolate wasteland of Death Valley, where past grievances and stolen gold lead to a final, haunting confrontation. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

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Produced by Pauline J. Iacono and David Widger

McTEAGUE

A Story of San Francisco

by Frank Norris

CHAPTER 1

It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car conductors' coffee-joint on Polk Street. He had a thick gray soup; heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. On his way back to his office, one block above, he stopped at Joe Frenna's saloon and bought a pitcher of steam beer. It was his habit to leave the pitcher there on his way to dinner.

Once in his office, or, as he called it on his signboard, “Dental Parlors,” he took off his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having c

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About This Edition

This edition of McTeague: A Story of San Francisco by Frank Norris is catalogued on Libreya under Fiction and runs approximately 112,631 words — about 563 minutes of reading at an average pace. It is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and every text on Libreya has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. You can view the original Project Gutenberg edition here.

On Libreya, the text has been carefully formatted for comfortable reading on any screen — with consistent chapter navigation, adjustable font sizes, and four reading themes: light, sepia, dark, and night mode. Your reading position is saved automatically when you sign in, so you can pick up exactly where you left off across any device. The original text has not been altered in any way; what you read here is the same work as it appeared in its original published form.

About Classic Fiction

Classic fiction represents the highest achievements of literary imagination. The novels in this genre have shaped how generations of readers understand human nature, society, and the fundamental questions of existence. Reading 19th and early 20th-century novels offers far more than historical interest: these stories explore love, ambition, morality, and identity with an insight that remains startlingly relevant today. Authors like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, Hardy, and Dickens wrote for readers much like us — people trying to make sense of a complicated world — and their observations on class, relationships, power, and conscience carry across centuries with barely diminished force. Classic fiction is also where the novel as an art form reached some of its greatest heights: innovative narrative structures, deeply realized characters, and prose styles that reward slow, attentive reading. These are not museum pieces. They are living works that continue to be discussed, adapted, and argued over because they capture something essential and enduring about human experience.