Frank Norris wrote McTeague in the San Francisco of the 1890s, and much of the book uses the local detail of this setting. He began the novel when at the English Department of Harvard University in 1895, although the bulk of the work was written in 1897. McTeague's murder of Trina is believed to be based on the murder of Mrs Sarah Collins, who was killed in late 1893 by her husband after she refused to give him money.[1][2] He was also greatly influenced by the realism and plotting of the novels of Emile Zola. In researching the terminology and practises of dentistry, Norris predominantly used Thomas Fillebrown's A Text-book of Operative Dentistry.[3]
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