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Learn moreThis 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.
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a journalist, a prominent social and political activist, and the author of over two dozen books, including the novel Dragon’s Teeth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943. He is perhaps best known for The Jungle, the dramatic exposé of the Chicago meat-packing industry that prompted the investigation by Theodore Roosevelt that culminated in the pure-food legislation of 1906.
Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over a thousand titles to his credit. Named one of the “Best Voices of the Century” and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“A tremendous piece of work.”
“He does his little bit of muckraking…but the glorious story of the oil man and his son rushes on. It is a marvelous panorama of Southern California life. It is storytelling with an edge on it.”
“Sinclair’s 1927 novel did for California’s oil industry what The Jungle did for Chicago’s meat-packing factories.”
“Grover Gardner plays it straight in a solid and believable performance that will engage listeners with its simplicity and earnestness…Gardner never fails to deliver with passion and vigor.”
“Grover Gardner does a superb job narrating, always conveying the humanity of the main characters while capturing the humor of the many caricatured stereotypes.”
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