Books: World's End to Fag-End

A WORLD TO WIN (624 pp.)—Upton Sinclair—Viking Press ($3).

Clio, Muse of History, is just a girl who can't say no. She has succumbed for the seventh time in six years to the same man—Upton Sinclair. But in their latest encounter, Volume VII of his novel-history of the 20th Century, 67-year-old Sinclair's powers seem to be failing.

A World to Win takes Presidential Agent Lanny Budd, a peripatetic pink who poses as a fascist, from the fall of France through the U.S. declaration of war. Lanny is a spy, plutocrat (son of a munitions...