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Reading lists

10 times fiction changed the world

There Will be Blood

Oil!

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), novelist and journalist, is best known for his novel about the Chicago meatpacking industry, The Jungle. A paperback edition of his I, Candidate for Governor is available from California.

Sinclair's 1927 novel did for California's oil industry what The Jungle did for Chicago's meat-packing factories. In Oil! Upton Sinclair fashioned a novel out of the oil scandals of the Harding administration, providing in the process a detailed picture of the development of the oil industry in Southern California. Bribery of public officials, class warfare, and international rivalry over oil production are the context for Sinclair's story of a genial independent oil developer and his son, whose sympathy with the oilfield workers and socialist organizers fuels a running debate with his father. Senators, small investors, oil magnates, a Hollywood film star, and a crusading evangelist people the pages of this lively novel.

The Jungle

One of the most powerful, provocative and enduring novels to expose social injustice ever published in the United States, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle contains an introduction by Ronald Gottesman in Penguin Classics. 
 
Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American Dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, and condemned for Sinclair's unabashed promotion of Socialism and unionisation as a solution to the exploitation of workers, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then President Theodore Roosevelt, and was a major catalyst to the passing of the Pure Food and Meat Inspection act, which has tremendous impact to this day. 
 
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was born into an impoverished Baltimore family, the son of an alcoholic liquor salesman. At fifteen, he began writing a series of dime novels to pay for his education at the City College of New York, and he was later accepted to do graduate work at Columbia. While there, he published a number of novels, but his breakthrough was The Jungle (1906), a scathing indictment of the vile health and working conditions of the Chicago meat-packing industry. After a dalliance with politics, Sinclair returned to novel-writing, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his account of the Nazi takeover of Germany in Dragon's Teeth (1942). 
 
If you enjoyed The Jungle, you might like Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, also available in Penguin Classics.

Upton Sinclair (1878&ndash;1968) was a Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author. The Jungle helped in the passage of the pure-food laws during the Progressive Era.

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then president Theodore Roosevelt, and was a major catalyst to the passing of the Pure Food and Meat Inspection act, which has tremendous impact to this day.

Upton Sinclair

Based on the oil scandals of the Harding administration, Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! burst into the literary limelight amid soaring petroleum profits and gaping inequalities in 1927. Whether telling the story of the land, the ordinary civilian, or the heirs to oil fortune, Sinclair skilfully paints a detailed picture of the effects of corporate corruption, greed and how the so called "American Century" was born. 
 
By turns an ardent family saga, scintillating potboiler, and anti-capitalist tirade, Oil! ranks among the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed. An exhilarating, bewildering and enraging novel, that anticipated how fossil fuels would shape the dilemmas of our present, Oil! looks toward a greener, more inclusive, and altogether more livable world yet to come.

Upton Sinclair

Books by Upton Sinclair

Articles featuring Upton Sinclair

10 times fiction changed the world

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