His single-minded intensity is the unifying feature. Sinclair was always the idealist--and the visionary--who agreed with Shelley that writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, or at least should be, and who seldom 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 nineteenth-century 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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