“... materialist mother and Marxist father are. Franzen’s work values these schema: it belongs to an Upton Sinclair tradition where a neat knot of ironies summing up the interconnections of the capitalist system is considered an ideal plot. Thus, the oil and gas man who wants to establish a refuge for a threatened songbird turns out to have a corporate ...”

“... counterexamples (from seven languages) Ghosh cites War and Peace, Moby-Dick and the work of Zola, Upton Sinclair and half a dozen Indian writers: Adwaita Mallabarman, Mahasweta Devi, Sivarama Karanth, Gopinath Mohanty, Vishwas Patil. (He could also have quoted Henry Fielding, who claimed in Tom Jones to ‘describe … not an individual, but a ...”

“... him. Over time he corresponded in a mutually admiring fashion with Emma Goldman, Jack London, Upton Sinclair and Hamlin Garland, and he was read and admired, so it is said in the three books written about him between 1913 and 1919, by Lenin. From what Folsom reports, it seems likely that in his middle years, from about 1899 to 1905, he had a ...”

“... the scions and the debris of the New Economy,1 but they are also, at their best, characters out of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, the sort of people who get up in the morning and count their change and wonder who they are. Yet something new did occur in the 1990s, and this newness is something the Franzen-type wants to approach at the level of the ...”

“... and struck-off quacks. Who, outside the fraternity, appreciates the sterling qualities of the Upton Park Mob, the Tibbs family of Canning Town, the Nash brothers, Alf White? Get your PR in first, before you pick up a shooter from ‘Dukie’ Osborne, if you’re into immortality. Hire your Joe Haines, like any other self-respecting tycoon. Give the legend ...”