His single-minded intensity is the unifying feature. Sinclair was always an idealist—and a visionary—who agreed with Percy Bysshe Shelley that writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, or at least should be, and who sel- dom doubted that his ideas and words would, if heeded, produce a better world. Beyond these surface attitudes, but never completely buried in his works, lie a number of contradictions and tensions. Sinclair was a person of essentially genteel and conservative upbringing who became a literary radical. Although he has often been seen as the champion of the oppressed, a novelist who wrote for and about the lowest working classes, many of his works have elitist tendencies. More than anything else, though, he was a nineteenthcentury idealist of initially romantic and even Nietzschean traits who chose to confront the hard facts of twentieth-century industrial life. His sense of certainty led him astray at times and prevented him from creating complex modern works of fiction, but he probably had a larger and more concrete influence on American life than most other novelists of the twentieth century.
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