Chapter XVI: Oil!

I.

One of the difficulties of writing a critical biography of a living writer is that he changes while he is being written about. When this book was begun, it was with the idea that Upton Sinclair, in spite of two fictional masterpieces, had found the novel too narrow a medium for the expression of his vast and robust interest in the social and economic tragi-comedy of life, and that he had reached his fullest self-realization in the series of great pamphlets descriptive of American culture. But there is now at hand the astonishing new novel, _Oil!_, upon which he has been at work for the past two years, and that judgment has to be reversed.

_Oil!_ stands beside and in many ways above _The Jungle_. It is a maturer work, and if it does not have the intensity and poignancy of that early masterpiece it has a greater breadth of vision and a deeper knowledge of life. Its curiosity and range and ease and power are Tolstoyan. It is a large book, a great canvas, as great as that of the great pamphlets, and carrying all their effects easily within its simple story. It is the story of Oil, in human terms, and in terms of all classes--the oil magnates and their families, the rich, the poor, the workers, idlers, the doll-house life of Hollywood, and the political machinations that have been reverberating through America for the last four years: it is all here, in the story of an oil magnate’s son, his father, his sweethearts, and his friends, including the vital figure of Paul, the young workingman who gives him his first glimpse into the rebel world beneath his happy paradise. No extended account of it will be given in these last pages; it suffices to say that it restores to us Upton Sinclair the novelist, and that it constitutes one of the great achievements in the literary discovery of contemporary America.

It is as though in the great pamphlets Upton Sinclair had found his stride, and brought back to the medium of fiction the verve and the reality which he had learned in dealing with life at close quarters. If he can continue in this masterful way, not even his Socialist preoccupations can prevent him from being recognized as America’s greatest novelist.

II.

It remains only to complete the picture with some brief account of his other activities, carrying the story of his life down to the present.... Little has been said of him here as a playwright; but he has written many plays, produced some of them himself under Socialist auspices, and one of his late plays, _Singing Jailbirds_, published in 1924, dealing with the ruthless persecution of the I. W. W. under the California “Criminal Syndicalist” law, is a more poignant and effective example of the expressionistic drama than any that has been produced on the American stage. It has been played in England as a means of raising funds for the striking miners, and last year in Vienna on the revolutionary anniversary, November 8th and 9th. This remarkable play is the outcome of the author’s experience in 1923, during the free speech fight at Los Angeles in connection with the I. W. W. harbor strike. The rights of free speech being illegally denied by the police to the members of the I. W. W., he undertook to uphold the law against those who, sworn to defend it, were engaged in violating it in the interests of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. He and his associates, assembling in San Pedro on private property with the consent of the owner, were arrested by the police for the crime of reading aloud, and hearing read, three sentences from the Constitution of the United States--those guaranteeing “freedom of speech and of the press, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for the redress of their grievances.” The act of reminding the people of California of these antique rights as guaranteed in that venerable document constituted a crime which made Sinclair, according to the Los Angeles chief of police, “more dangerous than 4,000 I. W. W.” The complaint on which he was illegally arrested charged him with “discussing, arguing, orating and debating certain thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories ... were detrimental and in opposition to the orderly conduct of affairs of business, affecting the rights of private property....” He was accordingly thrown into jail and held “incommunicado”. While in jail he learned of an incident which had happened there the day before--fifty men crowded into a small prison hole without air for singing their I. W. W. songs--the origin of his play, _Singing Jailbirds_. “I am not”, he wrote to the chief of police after his release on bail had been at last effected, “a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit that when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming on to private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice.”

III.

For a number of years Upton Sinclair has occupied a peculiar situation, as the publisher of his own books. This, as may be remembered, began with his first novel, which could at first find no publisher. _The Jungle_, also, when it had been rejected by five publishers, he decided to publish himself, and had made the plates when a publisher summoned up the courage to take it over--and made a fortune on it. Ten years afterward, _The Profits of Religion_ could find no publisher, and he published it himself; he has sold some sixty thousand copies, and still sells two thousand copies every year without advertising. He was told that there were fifty criminal libel suits and one or two thousand civil suits in _The Brass Check_, so he published that himself. He printed twenty-three thousand copies, and they were sold in two or three weeks; orders came in for forty thousand more, but this was at a time of paper shortage, and he found it hard to get paper--doubly hard, because in several instances when it was discovered what the paper was to be used for the orders were canceled; a hundred and thirty-five thousand copies were sold altogether, in spite of these difficulties. “Also”, the author remarks, “I have managed to give away seven or eight thousand copies of _Singing Jailbirds_.” _Jimmie Higgins_, _100%_, _The Goose-Step_, _The Goslings_, and _Mammonart_ were similarly published; and the business flourished sufficiently to enable him to buy the plates and copyrights of books originally published by other publishers, so that he now owns twenty-six of them, and has all but three or four in print. He does not, however, recommend the method to other authors, and tells the story of a man who was in the business of manufacturing brushes, and whose wife, when he found at the end of the year that he had been selling the brushes below cost, said enthusiastically: “But think what an enormous business you do!” The story sums up, he admits, his own experiences as a publisher. The method, however, keeps him in touch with his readers. “Never a mail comes that there is not a letter from some workingman or workingwoman, some poor student, or teacher, or political prisoner, who has been able to get my books for one reason and one only--that they are available at low prices. It is not an unusual thing for me to hear of a single volume that has been read by scores of people, prisoners in jail, of workingmen in mines and lumber camps, or teachers in a school, or professors in a college. I get letters from South Africa and South America, from Alaska and New Zealand, from India and Russia.” Many of his books, scarcely heard of in America, are best sellers in Great Britain and its colonies, in Germany, Italy, Holland, Denmark, the Scandinavian countries, and the states from Finland down to Serbia, while hundreds of editions were published in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, where the printing of his books has recently been made a state monopoly.

IV.

At the age of twenty-three it had been Upton Sinclair’s ambition, as expressed in the preface to his first novel, to publish a library of helpful books for “the humble people of our land.” This dream of a workingmen’s library has recently come true in an indirect way, as one of the enterprises conducted at his instigation by the “Garland Fund.” The manner in which the fortune which had been repudiated by a strange young millionaire named Charles Garland came to be used for this and other liberal and radical purposes is thus described by Sinclair in _What’s the Use of Books?_--a pamphlet published by the Vanguard Press:

“I am going to tell you a story. It is as strange as any fairy story you ever read, and with this one difference--it happened exactly as I tell it, and only three or four years ago.

“Once upon a time there was a young man who had been born into a home of luxury. He had everything in life that a young man could desire, and before he was twenty-one a relative died and left him a million dollars. Ask most Americans what they would like to have happen to them, and they will say that to have a relative die and leave them a million dollars would suit them fine. But for some strange reason it didn’t suit this rich young man. He was troubled with an uncomfortable thing called a conscience; he had the crazy notion that before a man spends money he ought to earn it. He said that he hadn’t earned that million dollars, and so he wasn’t going to take it.

“It was none of my business, but I was worried, thinking about that million dollars, and all the things that could be done with it. Lying there in a Wall Street bank, piling itself up--according to present-day customs being loaned out to speculators and big business men, and thus being used directly contrary to the ideas of the young man! I sat down and wrote him a letter, pointing this out and begging him to take the money and use it for spreading his ideas of social justice--or, if he hadn’t faith enough in his own ideas, then to entrust the money to a group of the best friends of social justice he could find. Many others wrote the young man to the same effect, and the upshot was that he changed his mind, and took the million dollars and established an endowment called ‘The American Fund for Public Service.’

“So there was a group of men and women having this responsibility; and right away they began getting letters from me. I wanted them to spend the money for one thing--cheap books for the workers. Books differ from most other things in that their inner spirit is not dependent on their outer form. The most important ideas in the world can be printed and sold for a few cents, and if you get the ideas they are exactly as useful to you as if they had come out of a costly volume printed on vellum and bound in silk. Therefore, I argued, _books should come first_.

“Others agreed with me, and so there came into being an institution called the Vanguard Press, having magically in its possession one hundred thousand dollars of that Wall Street money, and pledged through its trustees to spend the money in selecting the books most needed by the every-day people of this country, having them edited and printed, and offered to the people at the lowest possible prices.”

V.

Throughout his career, with the exception of the brief period during the war referred to in an earlier chapter, he has been actively identified with the Socialist Party; he was a Socialist candidate for Congress in 1906 and 1920, for the Senate in 1922, for governor of California in 1926. In the present state of the Socialist movement in America, split as it is between the Socialist and the Workers (Communist) Party, and with these groups more or less hostile to one another, he is the one figure, since the death of Debs, who commands the respect of all branches of the revolutionary movement.

VI.

Most of Upton Sinclair’s personality is expressed in his social-revolutionary interests and activities. Upton Sinclair, “the person,” aside from these activities, is a slight, wiry, graying figure, an early riser and hard worker, keeping one or two stenographers busy all day; an excellent tennis player, an eager talker; self-described as “easily bored, naïve and impersonal”; dealing with “griefs, troubles and failures” by putting his emotions into the book he is writing; somewhat skeptically interested in spiritistic phenomena, very hopefully interested in new devices, regarded as absurd by the medical profession, for curing disease; an occasional lecturer to women’s clubs, able to mitigate the shock of his opinions to precisely the amount that such organizations can stand; wearing the cast-off clothes of a rich young friend, precisely as when he was seventeen and living on $4.50 a week; always in debt, never hesitating to borrow money for some project which he regards as for the benefit of humanity; always hopeful of enormous success in each new project, each new book; very boyish, impulsive, trustful, stubborn; fondly regarded as impractical by those who love him ... including a wife who backs him loyally, and who appears in his writings as “M. C. S.”, and in _Mammonart_ as “Mrs. Ogi”.

VII.

Upton Sinclair is at this point in his career forty-eight years old; he intends to live to be as old as Bernard Shaw, and he probably will. His future literary career may bring surprises; the poet in him may yet overwhelm the propagandist. It is sufficient, however, to have seen the development of a raw cub of genius, an ethereal poet, afraid of real life, into the fearless and robust transcriber of the tragi-comic welter which is contemporary America. And we may conclude with the reminder that it is as one of the leaders of a significant American literary movement that he has here been studied--a movement which will seem of larger and larger importance to us as we learn and cherish our own literary history--a movement which was killed twenty years ago because there was too much troublesome truth in it, and which is only in these last few years being painfully born again: he is one of the great pioneers in the fictional discovery and exploitation of modern America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

[Books entirely out of print are so marked; editions in print are marked with a *.]

Springtime and Harvest. A Romance. [With an introduction by the
author, and photograph of the shack in the woods where the book
was written.] Sinclair Press, 1901. [Out of print.]

King Midas. A Romance. [A reissue of Springtime and Harvest with a
new title.] Funk & Wagnalls, 1901. [Out of print.]

The Journal of Arthur Stirling. “The Valley of the Shadow.”
Appleton [anonymous edition], 1903; [with the author’s name,
and an explanatory preface], 1906. Sinclair [with explanatory
postscripts], 1923.*

Prince Hagen. A Phantasy. L. C. Page, 1903. Kerr, 1910. [Out of
print.]

Manassas. A Novel of the War. Macmillan, 1904. Sinclair, 1923.*

A Captain of Industry. [A Tale.] Appeal to Reason, 1906.
Haldeman-Julius [pamphlet], 1924.*

The Jungle. [A Novel.] Doubleday, 1907. Sinclair, 1920.* Vanguard
Press, 1926.*

The Industrial Republic. A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence.
Illustrated. Doubleday, 1907. [Out of print.]

The Overman. [A Tale.] Doubleday, 1907. Haldeman-Julius [pamphlet],
1924.*

The Metropolis. [A Novel.] Moffat Yard, 1908. Sinclair, 1923.*

The Moneychangers. [A Novel.] Dodge, 1910. Sinclair [revised
edition], 1923.*

Good Health and How We Won It. By Upton Sinclair and Michael
Williams. Stokes, 1909. [Out of print.]

Samuel the Seeker. [A Novel.] Dodge, 1910. Sinclair, 1923.*

Plays of Protest. The Naturewoman. The Machine. The Second-Story
Man. Prince Hagen. Kennerley, 1911. Haldeman-Julius [separate
pamphlets], 1924.*

The Fasting Cure. Kennerley, 1911. Sinclair, 1923.*

Love’s Pilgrimage. [A Novel.] Kennerley, 1911. Sinclair, 1926.*

Damaged Goods. [Novelized from Brieux’s play.] Winston, 1913.*

Sylvia. A Novel. Winston, 1913. Sinclair, 1913.*

Sylvia’s Marriage. A Novel. Winston, 1914. Sinclair, 1927.*

The Cry for Justice. An Anthology of the Literature of Social
Protest. With an Introduction by Jack London. Illustrated.
Winston, 1915. Sinclair, 1920.*

King Coal. A Novel. With an Introduction by Dr. Georg Brandes.
Macmillan, 1917. Sinclair, 1917.*

The Profits of Religion. An Essay in Economic Interpretation.
Sinclair, 1918.* Vanguard Press, 1927.*

The Brass Check. A Study of American Journalism. Sinclair, 1919.*

The Crimes of the “Times”. [Pamphlet.] Sinclair, 1919.*

100%. The Story of a Patriot. Sinclair, 1920.*

The Bock of Life. Macmillan, 1921-22. Sinclair, 1921-22.*

They Call Me Carpenter. A Tale of the Second Coming. Boni &
Liveright, 1922. Sinclair, 1922.*

Hell. A Verse Drama and Photo-Play. [Pamphlet.] Sinclair, 1923.*

The Goose-Step. A Study of American Education. Sinclair, 1923.*

The Goslings. A Study of American Schools. Sinclair, 1924.*

Singing Jailbirds. A Drama in Four Acts. Sinclair, 1924.*

The Millennium. A Comedy of the Year 2000. [A tale based on a
play written in 1907 and subsequently lost.] Haldeman-Julius
[pamphlets], 1924.*

The Pot-Boiler. A Comedy in Four Acts. [Written in 1912.]
Haldeman-Julius [pamphlet], 1924.*

Mammonart. An Essay in Economic Interpretation. Sinclair, 1925.*

Bill Porter. A Drama of O. Henry in Prison. Sinclair, 1925.*

Letters to Judd, An American Workingman. Sinclair, 1926.*

The Spokesman’s Secretary, Being the Letters of Mame to Mom.
Sinclair, 1926.*

Oil! A Novel. A. & C. Boni, 1927.* Sinclair. 1927.*

INDEX

Alcohol, 21, 29 note.

Annapolis, 22, 47

Appeal to Reason, 104, 146

Arden, Del., 125 _et seq._

_Argosy, The_, 44, 46

Asceticism, 29 _et seq._, 60 _et seq._

Associated Press, 138, 139, 165, 166

Baltimore, Md., 16, 19

Bloor, Ella Reeve, 107

_Book of Life, The_, 151

Boys’ stories, 46, 47

Brandes, Georg, 113, 141

_Brass Check, The_, 165, quoted _passim_

Brieux, 133

Broadway demonstration, 137

Budget, 41

Carlyle, 36

“Chappie”, 32

Chicago, 16, 17 note, 103, 104, 107

Church, 38, 39, 162

Clothes, 41 note, 186

Coal Strike, 137

College, 34, 49, 52, 53

Colorado, 137

Constitution, U. S., 180

“Corydon”, 65

_Country House Built for Only $156, A_, 79

_Cry for Justice, The_, 140

_Damaged Goods_, 133

Dead Hand, The, 164

Divorce, 130

Eden Musée, 17 note

Emerson, 36

Farragut, David, 17, 18

_Fasting Cure, The_, 128

Free-Speech fight at Los Angeles, 180

Galahad, 61

Garland, Charles, 183

Genius and its claims, 50, 86

Genteel tradition in American Literature, 110

German Lessons, 68

Goethe’s picture, 54

_Goose-Step, The_, 167

Gorky incident, 111

_Goslings, The_, 168

Greenwich Village, 30 note

Hackwork, 41

Hamlet, 33, 39

Helicon Hall, 121

Herron, George D., 97, 100

Holland, 131, 132

_In the days of Decatur_, 46

_In the net of the Visconti_, 46

Indigestion, 42, 73, 128

_Industrial Republic, The_, 118

Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 103

Jail, 126, 138, 181

Jesus, 27, 33, 39

_Jimmie Higgins_, 146, 148

Jokes, 44

_Journal of Arthur Stirling, The_, 78, 86

_Jungle, The_, 84, 104

“Killing Spaniards”, 47

_King Coal_, 140

_King Midas_, 78

Languages, learning of, 53

Lee, Robert E., 20, 37

Lewis, Sinclair, 124

Lincoln, 37

Literary enthusiasms, 27, 36, 37, 39, 43, 52, 53, 54, 58, 61, 63, 93,
94

London, Jack, 102, 106, 114

_Love’s Pilgrimage_, 128, 176 quoted _passim_

_Love’s Progress_, 129 note, 175

Ludlow massacre, 137

_Machine, The_, 116

_Mammonart_, 169

_Manassas_, 101, 115

Marriage, 72; 2d, 136

_Metropolis, The_, 113, 114

Moir, Rev. William W., 39, 61

_Moneychangers, The_, 113, 116

“Mourning pickets”, 137

Moyer and Haywood, 111

“Muck-raking”, 109, 161

Music, 26, 28, 29 note, 65, 73

_My cause_, 94

New York, 31

Nietzsche, 52

Norfolk, 17

Norris, Frank, 104, 114, 160

_Oil!_, 178

_100%: The Story of a Patriot_, 149

Packingtown, 103, 104, 107

Perry, Commodore, 17

Phillips, David Graham, 105, 109

Picketing on Broadway, 137

Play, 29, 186

Plays, 125, 179

Poetic ambitions, 42, 51, 56, 88

_Prince Hagen_, 78, 99

Professors, 35, 52

_Profits of Religion, The_, 162

Publisher of his own books, 181

Puritanism, 13, 155, 175

Realism, defense of, 176

Residence, 16, 31, 55, 72, 79, 84 note, 87, 103, 121, 125, 131, 132,
136, 137, 139, 140, 143[16]

Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 137, 139, 140

Roosevelt, Theodore, 107, 108

Ruskin, 37

Russia, 148, 158

Sabbath-breaking, see Arden

_Samuel the Seeker_, 128

San Pedro arrest, 180

Scott, Sir Walter, 49

Shelley, 39, 53, 94, 160

_Singing Jailbirds_, 181

Single-tax colony, see Arden

Socialism, 97, 119, 158, 185

Socialists and the war, 143

_Springtime and Harvest_, 55, 74, 78

_Spy, The_, 149

Stockyards, 103, 104, 107

Street & Smith, 46

_Sylvia_, 132

_Sylvia’s Marriage_, 133

Tarrytown, 139

Tennis, 29 note, 186

Thackeray, 27

“Thyrsis”, 69 _et passim_

Tolstoyan-Tennysonian idealism, 70

Toys, 28

_Upton Sinclair’s_, 146

van Eeden, Frederik, 128, 131

Wells, H. G., 118, 151

_What’s the Use of Books?_, 183

Wilson, Woodrow, 146, 148, 150 note

Zola, 160

FOOTNOTES

[1] He did, however, hear about the Haymarket riot later, when the family moved to New York. “I remember seeing wax-works of the anarchists making their bombs, in the Eden Musée, and I believed every word of it--or shall I say, every wax-work of it. I well remember the name of Altgeld [the governor of Illinois who later pardoned the surviving Haymarket anarchists from prison] as a kind of super bomb-thrower! I swallowed all its ideas complete.”

[2] “Sinclair, Arthur. Lieutenant, 10 June, 1807. Commander, 2 July, 1812. Captain, 24 July, 1813. Died 7 February, 1837.”--_U. S. Army and Navy Register._

[3] “Sinclair, Arthur. Midshipman, 4 March, 1823. Passed midshipman, 4 June, 1831. Lieutenant, 3 March, 1835. Commander, 14 September, 1855. Dismissed 18 April, 1861.”--_U. S. Army and Navy Register._

[4] However, Sinclair writes in a private letter: “I am not opposed to the play aspects of life. The facts are these: As a boy, I did every kind of playing that boys can do. I played tennis in Central Park, football and baseball in vacant lots, and was nabbed by the police in the usual style, built bonfires and roasted stolen potatoes, skated on ice in winter and played shinny on roller skates the rest of the year, climbed on the roofs and threw clothes-pins at the people on the street. I was in every kind of danger. I used to say, playfully, that fate must be keeping me alive for some purpose, because I had escaped death by a hair’s breadth a dozen times before I was fourteen. I could outrun any boys I knew for long distances. I have run all the way around Central Park, and I have ridden a bicycle from up town in New York over Brooklyn bridge to Coney Island, gone in swimming in March with snow on the ground, and then ridden home again; this at the age of seventeen. At about that age I set out with desperate determination to learn to play the violin, practicing eight hours a day. It was work, but done in order that I might be able to play. At the present time, when my wife is ill and I have to stay at home nearly all the time, I play an hour or two every day--always sight reading, and I get as much excitement out of struggling through a Mozart sonata as some people get out of a horse-race. I get as much fun out of a tennis tournament as any of the young fellows. I have also been devoted to the theatre, having never missed seeing a good play except because of poverty.

“From the age of twenty to twenty-eight or twenty-nine I did no playing, but this was because I was in a desperate struggle to survive as a writer; but that was not a matter of philosophy but of practical necessity. You wouldn’t say that a man was opposed to play because he didn’t play while he was in a battle.

“Theoretically I am opposed to play under the following circumstances; first, when it is cruel and involves wanton suffering to either human beings or animals. I have always enjoyed hunting and fishing, but the game or fish were always eaten. Second, when the play is destructive to health; and that is the basis of my objections to the kind of play which involves alcohol. I know so many ways to have a good time which do not involve a headache next morning. Naturally, the condition of my father’s liver when he died has a good deal to do with this attitude. Third, play which is not a recreation after work, but a substitute for work. I saw in Greenwich Village a great many young idlers calling themselves radicals and doing nothing for the movement, and that made me tired....

“I think you mistake my attitude toward dancing. As a boy at various ‘springs’ in Virginia, I danced a lot and was duly dressed up for fancy balls. I remember very well being a ‘baker’. I don’t think I was more than six years old, and I was expected to carry a tray with rolls on it, but I very soon shed that encumbrance. Later on I never danced, simply because the dancing I saw was done by the idlers of ‘society’, wasting time, and it was a matter of expensive clothes, and all that sort of social frummery: either that, or you had to patronize the underworld. My objection to modern jazz dancing is that it represents the taking possession of America by that underworld. I think that jazz dances are awkward and ugly, being imitations of savage sex dances. Of course, as time goes on, if they survive, they will be idealized....

“My ethical ideals on these questions are very simply stated, and they seem to me entirely practical. I want grown-up human beings to have some serious work to do, something constructive, something which constitutes their main interest. When they have worked at this with real, full-sized energy and determination, then let them recreate both minds and bodies by any kind of play whatever which they enjoy, and which does not interfere with their ability to go back to their work.”

[5] Detail, from a letter: “Twenty-five cents a week for clean collars and cuffs, and newspapers. I wore the cuffs up high to keep them from showing too much and getting soiled too fast. I did not have to buy any clothes--my cousin H---- used to send me his cast off clothes. My meals cost $3 a week.”

[6] Comment from a letter: “No human male could have been more pitifully ignorant of the female critter, body, mind, and soul, than I was at the age of 21. It was a tragedy, but I was not to blame. It was the Victorian age.”

[7] In the more-or-less autobiographical novel, _Love’s Pilgrimage_, it is related of Corydon and Thyrsis that they did carry out this idealistic plan for a time after they were married. That version is scarcely more than a dramatic heightening of some of the facts, and the fiction does make clear the underlying neurotic conflict in the young poet’s mind.

[8] In 1902 he took the account of this birth-scene to Paul Elmer More, one of the leaders of the academic school of criticism then in power, and was told that it could “_never_ be published.”

[9] To be exact, the $25 study was moved on a wagon to a farm near by in the fall of 1904, and it was there that _The Jungle_ was written.

[10] For instance, Richard Le Gallienne wrote of it as “at once an authoritative document, a heart-searching appeal, and a tragic entertainment. I don’t remember to have seen the old case of ‘the Poet _versus_ the World’ put with more truth, more vehemence, and more charm.”

[11] The Intercollegiate Socialist Society was to become the center of rebellious thought and the forum for free discussion in the conservative colleges of America. Few students with any spark of intellectual curiosity but were touched by its liberalizing influences.

[12] This, however, appears to have been deliberate, because he was going to show how Thyrsis learned, in the second volume.

[13] I have read the manuscript of this unpublished novel, and may be permitted to express the hope that it will eventually be published.

[14] Sinclair appears, under the name of Sanford Peyton, as a pro-war Socialist in a novel by the present writer, _An Old Man’s Folly_, which deals with American pacifists in war-time. Sinclair, in reviewing the novel, remarks that the war-time opinions attributed to him are correct, and adds: “I can only tell him that reading them over now makes me very unhappy, and I find myself with a continual impulse to get into jail with the rest of his characters! I have had almost ten years to think the thing over, and what I have to report is that if at the beginning of 1917 I had known what I know to-day, I would have opposed the war and gone to jail with the pacifist radicals.” Later in the review he remarks of the Presidential idealist in whom he believed at the time: “I cannot forgive him; it is not merely that he made a fool of himself, but he made a fool of me!”

[15] However, in a letter, Sinclair defends himself against this charge, saying: “I have no trace of that early bias left. You may think I have, but I haven’t. What I have is a repugnance to ‘love-making’ without love.”

[16] Since 1926, Long Beach, Cal.