Oil! - Readings

Description

Upton Sinclair's searing indictment of fossil fuels that predicts our current warming planet while imagining a greener and more inclusive future

A Penguin Classic

Perhaps most well-known today as the inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s film There Will Be Blood, Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! burst into the literary limelight amid soaring petroleum profits and gaping inequalities in 1927. By turns an ardent family saga, scintillating potboiler, and anti-capitalist tirade, Oil! ranks among the most important critiques of fossil energy ever printed; and while anticipating how fossil fuels have shaped the dilemmas of our present, it also looks toward a greener, more inclusive, and altogether more livable world yet to come. This edition features a contextual introduction by Michael Tondre that illuminates the novel’s urgent timeliness in our warming world.

About the Author

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel,The Jungle(1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.The Junglehas remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he publishedThe Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication ofThe Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.Timemagazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.