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This book is the inspiration for the Academy Award-nominated film, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis.As he did so masterfully in The Jungle, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Upton Sinclair interweaves social criticism with human tragedy to create an unforgettable portrait of Southern California's early oil industry.Enraged by the oil scandals of the Harding administration in the 1920s, Sinclair tells a gripping tale of avarice, corruption, and class warfare, featuring a cavalcade of characters, including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist. At the center of the novel are an oil developer and his son. As the story moves forward, the divide between father and son grows until the young man is fighting the very industry that brought his father great success.Sinclair's glorious 1927 epic endures as one of our most powerful American novels of social injustice.
Sinclair's writing style is gregarious, repetitive. He hits you on the head with the 'poor working class stiff' schtick, but if you can get past it, what he's describing is actually quite interesting. Sinclair's book is a worthwhile read not only for its striking similarities to our own times, which many people have already stated. But his depictions of the early 20th century in southern California, the social mores, the living conditions, the locations -- are all his images, as he experienced them, or imagined them. They may not have been 'real' but they are certainly what we no longer experience. Los Angeles and Long Beach with derricks, dirt road travelling, working class lives, oak forests in places no longer existant, oil derrick explosions. It was incredibly interesting to read Sinclair's version of how derricks were built, maintained, and occasionally destroyed. Highly recommended for California early 20th century history buffs.
