Upton Sinclair by Floyd Dell

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.