Novel: Dragon's Teeth

Overview
Upton Sinclair’s Dragon’s Teeth (1942), the third novel in the Lanny Budd series, follows an American art expert as he moves through Europe during the mid-1930s and watches Nazism harden from political movement into a machinery of terror. Mixing melodrama, reportage, and political analysis, the book tracks the moral choices of privileged cosmopolitans as they confront persecution, propaganda, and the failure of liberal illusions. It won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel and stands as the cycle’s most searing portrait of Hitler’s ascent.

Setting and Historical Frame
The story spans the crucial years in which Adolf Hitler consolidates power: the purges of 1934, the codification of anti-Jewish repression in the Nuremberg Laws, and the regime’s growing militarism and police state. Sinclair stages scenes in Berlin, Paris, the French Riviera, London, and Switzerland, moving between salons, ministries, newsrooms, and the new concentration camps to show how everyday life narrows under totalitarian rule even as international society tries to continue as before.

Plot
Lanny Budd, a well-connected American art dealer with ties to industrialists and statesmen, uses his social access to observe and sometimes influence events. His wealthy wife, Irma, and his glamorous mother, Beauty, embody a transatlantic elite that wants peace and normalcy; his industrialist father worries about markets and labor unrest. Lanny’s work, sourcing Old Masters and dealing with collectors, brings him into contact with Nazi officials eager to launder reputations and taste through art, a contact that Sinclair exploits to place his protagonist in rooms with party leaders and secret policemen.

When Jewish and left-wing friends in Germany begin to disappear, Lanny’s detachment erodes. He undertakes increasingly risky missions to spirit people and assets across borders, leveraging his passport, money, and charm. A central sequence sees him arrested by the Gestapo and confined, where he witnesses beatings, informers, hunger, and the systematic breaking of prisoners. The experience strips away any residual belief that the regime’s violence is temporary or exceptional, and it teaches him the logic of terror from the inside: arbitrary authority, bureaucratic cruelty, and the intimidation of bystanders.

Securing release through a mix of back-channel influence and the Nazis’ own interest in art and foreign currency, Lanny returns to his role as go-between, but with a hardened purpose. He shuttles messages, negotiates ransoms, and organizes escapes, drawing Irma into philanthropy and clandestine rescue work. Their marriage absorbs the strain of danger, ideological disagreement with family elders, and the knowledge that money can save some but not all. As public humiliations escalate and pogroms erupt, the story closes on a Europe sowing the dragon’s teeth of future war: emboldened tyrants, intimidated democracies, and a refugee tide that civilized capitals prefer not to see.

Characters
Lanny functions as observer-actor, his empathy tested against his privilege. Irma evolves from guarded heiress to committed participant in rescue efforts. Beauty and Lanny’s father represent social glamour and hard business respectively, each shading into complicity through denial, self-interest, or fatalism. Historical figures, Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, and others, appear as chillingly plausible hosts and patrons, their taste for art and status juxtaposed with their orchestration of brutality.

Themes and Approach
Sinclair indicts the interdependence of capital, culture, and dictatorship, showing how art dealing, finance, and diplomacy can become conduits for moral evasion or instruments of survival. The novel probes propaganda’s theater, the temptation of wishful thinking, and the ethics of intervention. Its documentary texture, dense with meetings, memos, and news bulletins, serves a thriller’s momentum, making political catastrophe feel intimate and unavoidable.

Significance
Dragon’s Teeth crystallizes the Lanny Budd saga’s guiding question: what can a privileged individual do when legality masks injustice and power rewards conformity. As the series pivots from warning to witness, Sinclair records how the seeds of war are planted not only by tanks and laws, but by the quiet accommodations of those who think they can live with them.