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> To Reader Pack, thanks for an excellently synthesized statement of attitudes which have lately shown signs of a trend. He might also consider well whether he does not voice two typical illusions; namely, 1) that appeasement offers an easy and successful way to stand up against dictators; 2) that citizens of one part of the country—even the Rocky Mountain West—show greater perspicacity about the nation's welfare than citizens of any other part.—ED.
Novelist Sinclair Wonders
Sirs:
One of the mysteries which have puzzled me during 45 years as a professional writer has been the nameless persons who judge books for our big business magazines and newspapers. What have they done which gains them the authority to patronize the creative writers of their time? "Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, that he is grown so great?" I am set to wondering again by reading the beginning of your review of my novel, World's End [TIME, June 24].
"To the literary, the novels of Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, King Coal, Oil, Boston, etc.) are not literature. To historians, they are not history. To propagandists, they are not propaganda. But to millions of plain people, they are all three of those things."
I suppose it is a question of definition. "Literary," of course, means the little coterie of New York intellectuals; but what does "plain" mean? Was Jack London plain? He hailed The Jungle as the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery." I have before me an old circular of the book which quotes in its praise Arthur Brisbane, Robert Hunter, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, London Punch, David Graham Phillips and the Hon. Winston Churchill—an odd list of "plain people." . . .
And then I look up some of the circulars about Oil!, and find enthusiastic letters from William E. Borah, John Farrar, John Haynes Holmes, Floyd Dell, Robert Herrick, Lewis Mumford, Arthur Davison Ficke, William Ellery Leonard . . . Norman Thomas. Some of the above are "literary" and they found that Oil! was literature. Some of them are propagandists, and they found that it was propaganda.
Now comes a new novel, a very long one, 740 pages. Your reviewer says that "as an interpretation of history, World's End needs to be read with a certain care if it is not to be limitlessly untrustworthy. Sinclair's dice are loaded, etc." The fact is that World's End was read by several historians and participants in the Paris Peace Conference and corrected in accordance with their detailed suggestions. . . .
I have to put up as best I can with TIME'S complaints concerning my simplicity of mind. After all, in the course of my 40 years' battle for social justice, I have been called worse things than "a healthy, sincere, and well-informed old gentleman!" I shall keep on trying, and maybe after I am dead the then literary editor of TIME will discover that I was a novelist.
UPTON SINCLAIR
Pasadena, Calif.
>TIME did not deny that Reader Sinclair was a novelist; it only explained what kind of novelist he was.—ED.
Good & Mad
Sirs: