# McTeague — Character guide

> Key figures in McTeague by Frank Norris.

- [McTeague](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/mcteague.md): McTeague is an unlicensed dentist in a Polk Street flat, a man of enormous hands and small horizons whose pleasures are his concertina, his canary, and his beer. When he falls for Trina Sieppe, the feeling arrives like w
- [Trina Sieppe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/trina_sieppe.md): Trina enters the flat as a patient with a broken tooth and becomes the still point around which two friends rearrange their lives. Her early married days swing between revulsion at her husband's coarseness and fierce, cl
- [Marcus Schouler](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/marcus_schouler.md): Marcus is the dentist's pal and Trina's acknowledged suitor, a restless type who keeps company with many girls and settles on none. When he sees that McTeague's passion outruns his own, he stages a grand renunciation, we
- [Maria Macapa](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/maria_macapa.md): Maria cleans McTeague's rooms, gossips across the building, and thrills at dogfights and small scandals with equal appetite. Her recurring tale of a lost golden service is half memory, half mania, and it lodges in the mi
- [Old Grannis](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/old_grannis.md): Old Grannis keeps to his tiny room, tending a little dog hospital and avoiding the conversation he most wants to have. He and Miss Baker share a wall, a wallpaper pattern, and a mutual, unspoken devotion that neither can
- [Zerkow](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/zerkow.md): Zerkow trades in other people's discards, hoarding and scheming in a shop thick with refuse, and he listens to Maria's tale of the gold service with a greed that borders on worship. He wants the story to be true and want
- [Miss Baker](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/miss_baker.md): Miss Baker is the flat's resident spinster, a little dressmaker so openly smitten with Old Grannis that she chatters about him to anyone who will listen, oblivious to the gossip she feeds. She invents baronet titles and 
- [Mr. Heise](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/mr_heise.md): Mr. Heise belongs to the small circle of Polk Street tradesmen and lodgers who orbit McTeague's dental parlors, one of the men the dentist genuinely likes and trusts. As McTeague's life tangles around Trina and Marcus, H
- [Mr. Sieppe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/mr_sieppe.md): Mr. Sieppe heads the large, boisterous Sieppe family, whose picnics, outings, and crowded domestic life give Trina her social world and give McTeague his first taste of belonging to a household. He and his wife treat Mar
- [Cribbens](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/cribbens.md): Cribbens is a drifting, hard-luck prospector type who crosses McTeague's path once the dentist's settled life has come apart and he is moving through the world unmoored. He offers the kind of casual, unjudging male compa
- [Owgooste](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/owgooste.md): Trina's younger brother, a clumsy and awkward boy.
- [Uncle Oelbermann](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters/oelbermann.md): Trina's wealthy uncle who manages her lottery winnings.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/mcteague_se/characters