Most discussions of Norris's ideas, or lack of them, owe much to Franklin Walker's biography of Norris. In that work Walker stressed Norris's “boyish enthusiasm” and his code of “feeling” raised above “thought.” Walker implied by this emphasis that Norris was not a systematic thinker and that it would be futile to search for a coherent intellectual position in his fiction or criticism. But Walker's characterization of Norris is misleading for two reasons. A writer under 30 does not have to appear solemn to think seriously. And the rejection of “thought” for “feeling” is itself capable of expansion into an elaborate intellectual position. Because Norris advised others to feel does not mean that his advice was not reasoned. Indeed, in the history of man much thought has been devoted to the creation of anti- intellectual philosophies. At the heart of the unified and coherent system of ideas underlying Norris's criticism is a primitivistic anti- intellectualism. One method of describing this system is to adopt as convenient counterwords the key terms in Norris's cry that life is better than literature. Superficially, he affirmed by this statement that firsthand experience (“life”) is better than secondhand experience (“literature”). But when theterms are placed in the context of Norris's critical essays, one realizes that they are Norris's inadequate symbols for two rich and opposing clusters of ideas and values. I therefore use “life” and “literature” both with recognition of their deficiencies as generally viable critical terminology and with an appreciation of their usefulness and appropriateness when analyzing Norris's critical ideas. To Norris, “life” included emotions and instincts. It incorporated both the world of nature (the outdoors and the country) and the kind of life that Norris believed “natural” (the life of passion and violence, and the life of the low and fallen) because such life was closest to the primitive in man and furthest from the cultivated. “Literature,” on the other hand, included thought, culture, over- education, refinement and excessive spirituality. “Life” was dominated by connotations of masculinity, naturalness and strength; “literature” by suggestions of effeminacy, artificiality and weakness.