At the end of the 19th century two muckraking writers -- one a newspaper man, the other a novelist -- challenged one of the nation's most powerful corporations, the Central Pacific Railroad.
The image of the California-based railroad as a exploitative, manipulating monster was vividly drawn in Amborse Bierce's series of articles written for the San Francisco Examiner after the CP managed to avoid repaying federal loans. Using Bierce's work and other sources, Frank Norris later crafted the fictionalized account of farmer versus railroad in the naturalistic novel, The Octopus.
The battle between the two writers and the company is freshly told in The Great American Railroad War, a new work by Dennis Drabelle, contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World. Drabelle describes how the railroad developed, grew into a formidable economic and political power and subsequently attracted the ire of Bierce and Norris. Kirkus Reviews calls it a "a nicely crafted portrait of monopolists and muckrakers."
The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took On the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad
St. Martin's Press, 320 pages, $26.99
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