The Return of Lanny Budd II

by Upton Sinclair

272 pages, Paperback

Published January 20, 2001

About the author

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.

Reviews

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This part, 11th in the series beginning with World's End, covers the beginning of cold war and the disenchantment of Lanny Budd with socialist and communist ideologies, chiefly due to practices of the regimes professing these ideologies rather than any reducing of his belief in rights of individuals, equality of people, freedom, and so forth. He has opposed the fascist and worse regimes with all he could do, lost a great deal in the process (- one beautiful and loved wife left him due to her conviction that right wing regimes were not wrong in keeping the poor out and the poor were only out to fleece everyone with a soft heart, and another was a German caught by occupation Gestapo in Paris and tortured to death; then there were other friends and relatives galore) - and finally saw their downfall with the end of wwII, testifying against those that were fooled in thinking he was with them. But the role of leftists has now ('46 - '49, the time period covered in this part) undergone a change from rights of humanity and equality of people to adherence to repressive regimes at all costs including of conviction, thought, mind and soul, not to mention lives of anyone who opposes. So Lanny and his wife (he married a writer from Baltimore post loss of his second wife to torture chambers in Paris and mourning her in total secrecy of necessity, due to his role as secret agent of Roosevelt) run an independent radio station to air thoughts of those that would not so adhere to any such regimes and champion freedom, equality, thinking.