Oil! by Upton Sinclair

The prototype for Lanny Budd

Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! was published in 1927. It takes place in Southern California, amid fictional towns with names like Angel City and Beach City. The story opens somewhere around 1910. J. Arnold Ross, a former mule driver, has struck it rich as a self-made oil tycoon. He travels around California buying up land and drilling exploratory wells, some of which have paid off quite handsomely. Accompanying him on his business trips is his young son, J. Arnold Ross Jr., nicknamed Bunny. As he grows into manhood, Bunny enjoys the wealthy lifestyle made possible by Dad’s profits, but he doesn’t understand why the laborers who make such profits possible are often forced to live less fortunate lives and endure relative poverty and dangerous occupational hazards. When the oil workers strike against Dad’s company, Bunny finds himself advocating for the workers’ rights. As the story progresses through World War I, the Harding and Coolidge administrations, and the Teapot Dome scandal, Bunny’s personal values grow more and more anti-capitalist, and he becomes a more active ally of the socialist movement in America.

In recent years, Oil! has enjoyed some resurgence of attention because it is the book upon which the film There Will Be Blood is based. There’s very little similarity between that movie and this novel, however, other than they both deal with the oil business during the same time period.

Anyone who has read any of the novels in Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series will be struck by the close resemblance between Oil! and the eleven novels in that series. All are written in exactly the same style. Although dealing with serious subject matter like war, poverty, and labor unrest, the tone of the writing in both cases is oddly breezy and light-hearted, with a somewhat sarcastic humor. Bunny, for all intents and purposes, is Lanny Budd, except that instead of a European playboy, Bunny’s a Californian. Both characters are wealthy young men with wealthy fathers who, despite their high class status, learn to sympathize with the socialist cause. Their leftist ideals clash with those of their more conservative fathers. Lanny and Bunny even have similar love lives, and both become annoyingly involved in séances and mediums, allowing Sinclair to indulge his pet paranormal interest of spiritualism (communication with the dead).

In both cases, Dad’s job and wealth allows the son to mingle with all kinds of important personages. The Lanny Budd series uses real famous people, but almost all of the politicians, movie stars, and tycoons in Oil! are fictitious. Sinclair supplies supporting characters representing all levels of social status and class hierarchy in order to explore events and issues of the period, thus compiling a fictional narrative loaded with “people’s history” in the vein of Howard Zinn. To that end, however, Oil! is less successful than any of the Lanny Budd novels because it’s less realistic in its conspiracy-theories and in its optimistic visions of a utopian socialist future. Sinclair spends many pages praising the Soviet Union to high heaven in this novel. Eventually, after Stalin’s atrocities became common knowledge, he would do some major back-pedaling in books like The Return of Lanny Budd (1953). Despite all of its exaggerations and meandering storytelling, however, like all of Sinclair’s books it nevertheless ends up being a valuable historical document of American culture at the time the story is set, albeit from a leftist perspective.

It’s hard to understand why Oil! is Sinclair’s second best-known book after The Jungle, since it certainly isn’t close to being his second-best book. The Lanny Budd series may be intimidating to those who don’t want to settle in for an 11-novel haul, but it is ultimately worth the effort. Having read about 30 of Sinclair’s books myself, I would also recommend Mountain City and 100%: The Story of a Patriot.