Upton Sinclair by Floyd Dell

I.

Modern industrial America has proved a difficult theme for the artists whose business it is to handle it. There have been two recognized attitudes of literary approach to this theme. The first, to be found in the popular magazines, is an attitude of uncritical adulation and blatant celebration of the advantages which accrue to its beneficiaries. The other attitude, now found increasingly in fiction appealing to the intelligentsia, is one of hopeless sentimental protest against a machine civilization which is conceived as utterly vicious, spiritually degrading, and altogether too hideous and uninteresting to be worth picturing in any realistic detail -- the space being occupied instead by accounts of the miseries of the sensitive and artistic souls who are represented as its chief victims. A welcome from the American intelligentsia awaits any writer who will picture present conditions as a confused and hopeless chaos; and on the other hand a vast popularity, though with no such critical esteem, awaits the writer who will uncritically celebrate the joys of riding about in expensive motor cars, eating at expensive restaurants, playing at expensive sports, indulging in expensive adultery, and exploiting generally the advantages which accrue to the beneficiaries of the industrial process. From a literary point of view, the objection to both these methods is that they fail to come to grips with their subject.