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Oil! by Upton Sinclair
Catherine Shoard22 Feb 2008
UPTON Sinclair's beefy 1927 story of an oil prospector in turn-of-thecentury California is a terrific yarn. But it doesn't bear much superficial resemblance to the film inspired by it: There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece with Daniel Day-Lewis as mad oil tycoon Daniel Plainview (here named J Arnold Ross). It's narrated by his son, Bunny, for a start, and majors on the child's creeping sympathy with the socialist labour movement. But Eli Sunday, egomaniac preacher extraordinaire, is present and correct, and you can taste something of the same cracked grandeur found in the film, that massive sweep of landscape and ambition.
Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk
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.
