Novel: Oil!

Setting and premise
Upton Sinclair’s Oil! follows the Southern California petroleum boom from the 1910s into the 1920s, using the rise of a new industry to expose the entanglement of capital, politics, labor, religion, and mass culture. At its center is the relationship between J. Arnold Ross, an ambitious, canny oil developer, and his son, James Arnold “Bunny” Ross, whose moral and political awakening provides the novel’s arc. The discovery and exploitation of oil fields, the scramble for leases, and the forging of business alliances give Sinclair a stage on which to dramatize America’s modern transformation and the costs hidden beneath prosperity.

Father, son, and the making of wealth
J. Arnold is portrayed as shrewd and pragmatic rather than sadistic, a man who prides himself on fair dealing even as he participates in bribery, price-fixing, and political manipulation when the stakes demand it. He shepherds derricks, pipelines, and refineries into being, navigating bankers and rivals as easily as he negotiates with small landowners. Bunny, trailing his father from rigs to boardrooms, sees workers’ injuries, crooked lease deals, and the quiet coercion that accompanies “business sense.” The father’s affection and competence complicate Bunny’s mounting doubts, giving the book its emotional tension: how do you judge a beloved parent who thrives in a corrupt system?

Friendship, class conflict, and radicalization
Bunny befriends Paul Watkins, the son of a poor rancher swept into oilfield labor. Paul’s hard experience, low wages, dangerous conditions, strikebreaking deputies, turns him toward socialism and industrial unionism. In counterpoint stands Paul’s brother, Eli Watkins, who reinvents himself as a charismatic revivalist preacher. Eli’s tent shows, faith healing, and radio sermons channel popular yearnings while tacitly serving business interests that fear unions more than sin. Through Paul’s organizing and Eli’s evangelical empire, Sinclair contrasts secular class solidarity with religious spectacle deployed to pacify or divide workers.

War, Hollywood, and the culture of the 1920s
The story ranges beyond the oil patch to chart a nation in flux. World War I intensifies patriotism and repression, fueling red scares that criminalize organizing and dissent. Hollywood, bursting into mass culture, offers Bunny a different mythology of success and desire, packaging glamour for profit just as oil packages energy. Bunny’s affairs and his intellectual attraction to independent-minded socialists, notably the thoughtful and uncompromising Rachel Menzies, challenge the era’s sexual and marital conventions and push him to reconcile private life with public ethics.

Scandal and the architecture of power
As fortunes swell, the deals grow darker. Sinclair threads a fictionalized version of the Teapot Dome affairs through J. Arnold’s network, showing how leases to naval oil reserves are secured by clandestine gifts and pressure applied through party machines and compliant officials. Congressional hearings and legal battles peel back the veneer of respectability, revealing an oil oligarchy enmeshed with the state. J. Arnold, burdened by investigations and the attrition of compromise, declines, and the empire he built becomes a test case for what Bunny will do with inherited power.

Resolution and moral choice
Bunny’s trajectory leads him away from the boardroom and toward the picket line, toward classrooms and publications that can train workers to think and organize. Paul’s persecutions, arrests under syndicalism laws, beatings by deputies, frame-ups, steel Bunny’s resolve. He rejects the comfortable path of benevolent capitalism, moving to endow institutions that aid labor, even at the cost of family loyalty, social standing, and personal security. The choice is depicted not as a clean break but as a struggle to live ethically in a system designed to punish dissent.

Themes and significance
Oil! is a panoramic social novel and a hard-edged satire. It anatomizes how a modern industry concentrates wealth, captures regulators, deploys culture and religion to blunt resistance, and turns the machinery of the state against those who challenge it. Through Bunny’s coming-of-age, Sinclair argues that decency at the individual level cannot redeem structural injustice, and that real reform requires power, education, and organization. The book’s blend of muckraking detail, melodrama, and sweeping social canvas captures the exhilaration and the moral wreckage of America’s leap into the fossil-fueled age.