Both in life and in writings Sinclair has attempted, as did Dickens, to be the persuading intermediary between the contending classes. With admirable sweetness of temper, considering his lack of success, he has continued to argue that the owning class should perform a revolution by consent, that the capitalist should give up his profits and power in exchange for citizenship in an industrial democracy. But in the novels that he has so prodigally brought forth year after year since the publication of The Jungle, the lamb of his Christian spirit has rarely been able peacefully to lie down with the lion of his Marxian vocabulary. As a result, although Sinclair is the only one of the Socialist novelists who continued … to write Socialist novels, his is the classic case among them for unresolved discrepancies between his fictional structure and the "message" that he is trying to convey…. (pp. 36-7)
Despite his artistic limitations … Upton Sinclair has built up over half a century a body of work which is a whole tradition in itself. The outstanding Socialist novelist of the first two decades, in the lonely twenties he almost was radical American literature. In the thirties the young Leftists, when they were not damning him as a "social fascist" in accordance with some current "Party line," admitted that his novels and tracts had been and still were instrumental in teaching them the facts of capitalist life. But Sinclair's work, from The Jungle onward, had always pushed out from radical circles into the wide ranges of the whole reading public to inform them of the social and personal irresponsibility of capitalists, the disruption of the middle class, the struggle of labor to organize, and the martyrdom of radicals. In the forties his moderately Socialist tales of Lanny Budd and a stricken century sold to hundreds of thousands of American citizens, who found them the easiest way to learn what historical events had prepared the Second World War and were preparing the "Peace." If Sinclair has never been a great creative novelist (what is Lanny Budd beyond a mirror of history?), he has been something else of value—one of the great information centers in American literature. Few American novelists have done more to make their fellow citizens conscious of the society, all of it, in which they live. (p. 38)
Walter B. Rideout, in his The Radical Novel in the United States 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (copyright © 1956 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; excerpted by permission of the publishers), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956.
