Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Sinclair, Upton (Vol. 15) - Van Wyck Brooks

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VAN WYCK BROOKS

It is natural that Mr. Sinclair should be popular with the dispossessed: they who are so seldom flattered find in his pages a land of milk and honey. Here all the workers wear haloes of pure golden sunlight and all the capitalists have horns and tails; socialists with fashionable English wives invariably turn yellow at the appropriate moment, and rich men's sons are humbled in the dust, winsome lasses are always true unless their fathers have money in the bank, and wives never understand their husbands, and all those who are good are also martyrs, and all those who are patriots are also base. Mr. Sinclair says that the incidents in his books are based on fact and that his characters are studied from life…. But Mr. Sinclair, like the rest of us, has seen what he wanted to see and studied what he wanted to study; and his special simplification of the social scene is one that almost inevitably makes glad the heart of the victim of our system. It fills...

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1. Introduction
2. Van Wyck Brooks
3. Robert Cantwell
4. Granville Hicks
5. Malcolm Cowley
6. George J. Becker
7. Jon A. Yoder
8. Copyright

1. Upton Sinclair