“... but his campaigns against local corruption in Oregon brought him the respect and friendship of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens, the last giants of the ‘Muckraker’ generation of American fiction and journalism which was already – by about 1910 – in decline. Steffens, especially, became a sort of literary and political godfather to young ...”

“... more or less by religious extremists’, become ‘this nation of insane consumerism’? Unlike Upton Sinclair and Dos Passos (clear influences on Gain) he doesn’t impose an answering thesis on the narrative, which ends with a twist which is, even for Powers, supremely ironic. Gain is more deeply felt than anything else Powers has written. He records ...”

“... 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 ...”