I respect [Upton Sinclair] because he says exactly what he thinks, even if it often sounds foolish to others and will eventually sound foolish to himself; he is willing to confess his mistakes. I respect him because he has acquired a great deal of sober wisdom about political affairs, and because he talks better sense than the people who laugh at him. And I respect him, too, because he has retained an old-fashioned and innocent love for mankind….
Perhaps [his] colorless picture of human motives was less of a fault in [the] earlier novels that I haven't read. But [in Wide Is the Gate] he is dealing with a period of moral dissolution, marked by the reappearance of deliberate evil—of Satan himself, you might say, stalking the earth in a form that he hadn't assumed since the Middle Ages. Sinclair doesn't believe in Satan; at heart he doesn't even believe in Heinrich Himmler. He is a capable writer when explaining the connection between economics and politics, but he never casts much light on the connection between politics and the human soul. You never feel in reading him that men, through committing political crimes, have been turned into monsters, or that they come to enjoy cruelty for its own sake, or that the political chaos in Europe—and in America too—was paralleled by a moral chaos. Instead you feel dull and slightly uplifted, as if the editorial page of an old-fashioned Socialist newspaper had been rewritten in terms of action and dialogue, but without being dramatized.
Malcolm Cowley, "Man of Good Will," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1943 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 108, No. 2, January 11, 1943, p. 58.
