As propaganda designed to enlist the sympathy of Americans for the plight of the Chinese at the hands of the Japanese, Dragon Seed belongs to a long tradition of ulteriorly motivated fiction dating from the doctrinaire religious allegory of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678) up to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851-1852) and the works of the American muckrakers such as Samuel Hopkins Adams and Upton Sinclair.

Many of the authors that Buck read and loved as a child wrote politicized novels. Dickens, for example, was concerned about the horrors of industrial society in Hard Times (1854), and Zola offered a mighty plea for social reform in Germinal (1885) by describing the bitter sufferings of workers in the French mines.