Norris, Kathleen (1880–1966)

Prolific American novelist and short-story writer. Born Kathleen Thompson in San Francisco, California, on July 16, 1880; died on January 18, 1966, in San Francisco; daughter of James Alden Thompson (a bank manager) and Josephine (Moroney) Thompson; studied briefly at the University of California, Berkeley; married Charles Norris (an editor and writer), in 1909 (died 1954); children: Frank (b. 1910); Josephine and Gertrude (twins, b. 1912, died in infancy); adopted four others, including her sister's three orphaned children.

Selected writings:

Mother (1911); The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne (1913); Saturday's Child (1914); The Story of Julia Page (1915); Undertow (1917); Josslyn's Wife (1918); Sisters (1922); Certain People of Importance (1922); The Callahans and the Murphys (1924); Noon (autobiography, 1925); Hildegarde (1926); The Foolish Virgin (1928); Margaret Yorke (1930); Second Hand Wife (1932); Wife for Sale (1933); Heartbroken Melody (1938); The Runaway (1939); The Venables (1941); Dina Cashman (1942); Corner of Heaven (1943); The Secret of Hillyard House (1947); High Holiday (1949); Shadow Marriage (1952); Miss Harriet Townshend (1955); Family Gathering (autobiography, 1959).

Born in San Francisco, California, on July 16, 1880, Kathleen Norris began her life in affluence, thanks to her father's position as a bank manager. Her parents James and Josephine Thompson were popular in the city's Irish community, and fostered an affectionate home for their six children. Norris was especially close to her lively and optimistic father, although her mother's devout Roman Catholicism also left a deep impression. When she was about ten, the family moved across the San Francisco Bay to Mill Valley, a village so rural that the children's main education came not from their occasional visits to the country school but from their father's wealth of books and magazines. Although Norris briefly attended a Dominican convent school, upon the family's return to San Francisco she opted to stay home to help her mother with her four younger siblings rather than continuing her education.

In 1899, both her parents died within a month of each other, leaving only some $500 in savings. Along with her sister and brother, Norris began working to support the family, taking jobs as varied as caretaker for children and invalids, sales clerk, bookkeeper and librarian. She began writing to earn extra income, receiving $15.50 from a newspaper for "The Colonel and the Lady," her first published story. After briefly studying at the University of California at Berkeley, she took a position as society editor of the Evening Bulletin, and later worked as a reporter on the San Francisco Examiner. She enjoyed the work and, although the Bulletin discharged her and the Associated Press assured her that writing was not her calling, she never gave up journalism entirely, even after she became an established novelist.

In 1909, Norris married Charles Norris, an editor who later became a realist novelist. (He was also the brother of the late Frank Norris, whose shocking 1899 novel McTeague remains a classic of the realist school of writing.) The couple moved to New York City, where Norris, freed from the burden of caring for her younger siblings, devoted herself to writing at the brisk pace of two novels per year. Her first novel, Mother (1911), drew from her family and her Irish-American background, and was an instant success. Thereafter, she stuck closely to this wholesome formula of ordinary folk with ordinary problems and dreams, focusing primarily on family stories and love stories (her one exception was a foray into realism, 1922's Certain People of Consequence, which sold poorly). Written in an easy, fluent style that had mass appeal, Norris' novels celebrated the traditional wife and mother, illustrated the worth of simple values and simple goodness, and invariably concluded with the proverbial happy ending. The very sentimentality and romanticism which made her so popular with readers kept her from critical acclaim, although even critics praised her powers of observation and accurate depictions of contemporary Irish-American life. It is primarily for this documenting of a now vanished life and culture that her books are still read. Norris also frequently contributed short stories to popular magazines, including McClure's, Woman's Home, Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and the Saturday Evening Post. Over the five decades of her writing career, she produced over eighty novels, two autobiographies, a play, short stories, poems, magazine articles, newspaper pieces and even a 1940s radio serial. All told, her novels sold ten million copies, and although she never won any literary awards she was one of the most popular and commercially successful authors of her time.

Though her novels never betrayed her political views, Norris was not afraid to stand up for her beliefs in public. She was a pacifist who spoke out in favor of disarmament, an active suffragist (despite the female characters in her novels), a supporter of Prohibition and a charter member of the isolationist America First group that fought to keep the U.S. out of World War II. After the war, she campaigned against nuclear testing and capital punishment. While her husband Charles held contrary views on many of these issues, and they belonged to different religions—he was Episcopalian, while she remained staunchly Catholic—their marriage was, by all accounts, enduring and affectionate. Throughout her career, Norris drew on his constant support, while he acted as her agent and as a buffer from distractions and interruptions. He died of a heart ailment in 1954, and in the late 1950s she was crippled by arthritis that forced her to spend four years in a San Francisco hospital. She continued writing until she was 80, and spent the last few years of her life living with her son Frank. Norris died of congestive heart failure in San Francisco on January 18, 1966.

sources:

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds. Twentieth Century Authors. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1942.

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.

Weatherford, Doris. American Women's History. NY: Prentice Hall, 1994.

collections:

The Kathleen Norris Papers are held at the Stanford University Library in Stanford, California; other collections of Norris' papers and items relating to her are held at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley and at the California State Library in Sacramento.

Jacqueline Mitchell , freelance writer, Detroit, Michigan