Oil! by Upton Sinclair

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s a little hard for me to fathom how this book “inspired” the movie There Will Be Blood. The film narrative is dark and Daniel Day-Lewis’s character is brooding, hateful and intense. Daniel Plainview’s poisonous temperament and greed couldn’t be farther from J. Arnold Ross, the optimistic, no-nonsense oil man in the book, father of Bunny Ross, his idealist “red” heir. The novel is really a vindictive account of president Harding’s corrupt government, the penetration of Bolshevism in the US with its consequent “red” paranoia. The persecutions of Socialist ideologies and the hunting down of Communist cells Read more →