Oil!: A Novel

Summary

This book is the inspiration for the Academy Award-nominated film, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

As he did so masterfully in The Jungle, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Upton Sinclair interweaves social criticism with human tragedy to create an unforgettable portrait of Southern California’s early oil industry.

Enraged by the oil scandals of the Harding administration in the 1920s, Sinclair tells a gripping tale of avarice, corruption, and class warfare, featuring a cavalcade of characters, including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist. At the center of the novel are an oil developer and his son. As the story moves forward, the divide between father and son grows until the young man is fighting the very industry that brought his father great success.

Sinclair’s glorious 1927 epic endures as one of our most powerful American novels of social injustice.