Oil! (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Upton Sinclair
- First Published: 1927
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Bildungsroman
- Subjects: Socialism, Twentieth century, Greed, Capitalism, Corporations, Oil wells or oil-well drilling, Southern California
- Locales: California
Oil! was to the California oil boom what The Jungle was to the Chicago stockyards: a chance for Sinclair to present, as he quipped, human nature laid bare. The first major American novel on the oil industry, this minor epic is a hard-nosed, hard-hitting docket of corporate machinations, in striking ways describing the United States today as much as during the Jazz Age. The Harding administration and the Teapot Dome scandals were the direct catalysts for Sinclair's reformist passion, and his exposé of bribery, corruption, appalling industrial practices, and dog-eat-dog...
[The entire page is 534 words long]
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