{ "item_title" : "The Octopus", "item_author" : [" Frank Norris "], "item_description" : "In California's San Joaquin Valley, wheat promises prosperity-but the railroad controls the route to market. For the ranchers who cultivate the land, rising freight costs and disputed ownership threaten everything they have worked to build.Magnus Derrick and his fellow wheat growers organize to resist the railroad's power. Their campaign draws them into political bargaining, legal disputes, and compromises that test their principles. As tensions deepen, the struggle moves beyond prices and property into a confrontation that threatens to turn neighbors into casualties.Watching the conflict is Presley, a young poet seeking a subject worthy of the American West. What he encounters challenges his ideas about progress, justice, and the relationship between individual lives and the forces governing them. Around him, families, laborers, businessmen, and political operatives pursue ambitions whose consequences reach far beyond their intentions.The railroad is Norris's octopus, its influence extending through commerce, government, and private life. Yet wheat also possesses a power of its own. Growing across immense fields and moving toward distant markets, it connects the ranchers' local struggle to a global demand for food. The crop that sustains their hopes belongs to an economic system no single person can command.First published in 1901 as The Octopus: A Story of California, the novel was inspired in part by the conflicts surrounding the Mussel Slough tragedy. Frank Norris combines the scale of an epic with the close human consequences of debt, ambition, dispossession, and violence. His ranchers are capable of courage and solidarity, but also pride, self-interest, and costly misjudgment.For readers drawn to historical fiction about corporate power, contested land, and communities under pressure, The Octopus offers a sweeping drama of agricultural California-and a searching examination of who prospers, who suffers, and what progress demands of those caught in its path.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/818/294/9798182941204_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "21.99", "online_price" : "21.99", "our_price" : "21.99", "club_price" : "21.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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