The Pit

Laura Dearborn says she'll never marry. Living with her sister and aunt in turn-of-the-century Chicago, she's content with her comfortable, studious life. But with three suitors eager to win her love, Laura must decide between the disparate futures each could provide her-and as speculators struggle for control of the market in the wheat pits of the Chicago Board of Trade, each of those futures hangs in the balance. Frank Norris intended The Pit to be the second installment in his Epic of the Wheat, a trilogy of novels describing the journey of a shipment of wheat from its harvest in California, through the speculation pits of Chicago, and finally to its consumption in famine-stricken Western Europe. Unfortunately, he didn't live to complete it; he died in 1902 and The Pit was published posthumously in 1903, leaving the trilogy unfinished. Equal parts love story and financial thriller, The Pit plunges readers into the roaring chaos of the Chicago Board of Trade, where fortunes are won and lost on the price of grain and a woman's heart becomes just another commodity to be speculated on. Frank Norris, one of America's great naturalist novelists, delivers a gripping portrait of ambition, obsession, and the perilous cost of chasing more. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)