[If] literature is an attempt to place ideology before readers in an understandable way, an obvious spokesman becomes a convenient tool rather than a literary liability. In this way Sinclair hoped to produce "propaganda of vitality and importance"—propaganda defined by Sinclair as the spreading of democratic socialism. (pp. 12-13) Far from a foreign ideology, Sinclair's concept of American socialism retained every significant aspect of an idealism often referred to as the America...

It is natural that Mr. Sinclair should be popular with the dispossessed: they who are so seldom flattered find in his pages a land of milk and honey. Here all the workers wear haloes of pure golden sunlight and all the capitalists have horns and tails; socialists with fashionable English wives invariably turn yellow at the appropriate moment, and rich men's sons are humbled in the dust, winsome lasses are always true unless their fathers have money in the bank, and wives never understand their husban...

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 Jung...

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 l...

Sinclair's [Boston] is a fascinating, if flawed work—baldly partisan pieces frequently are—a cut below The Jungle and others of his books. (p. 475) For those reading [Boston] for the first time, the story moves on two levels—that of the Sacco-Vanzetti case itself, and that of a wealthy Boston family that is touched by events….