There was one notable exception to this trend. It was Jack London’s _The Iron Heel_ (1908). Projecting his story into the future, he wrote of an America under the dictatorship of an Oligarchy serving the interests of the large corporate and industrial groups. The reader learns that the Oligarchy was eventually overthrown, but the book concentrates upon a fictitious era of horrors unequalled until the appearance of Orwell’s _1984_ forty years later. In his introduction to the novel, Anatole France called London a Revolutionary Socialist. This he was, and--in the novel, at least--a devoted Marxist as well. The book was clearly meant to be a political instrument. Its fulfillment of this aim may be judged by a comment of Stephen Spender in his contribution to _The God That Failed_ (1950). He remarks that Harry Pollitt, a high official of the English Communist Party, had told him that in his opinion _The Iron Heel_ was “the best revolutionary novel.” The Communist view of the propaganda value of literature makes the comment significant. =Upton Sinclair: Corruption Plus Radicalism.= Upton Sinclair’s books were among those which marked the beginning of a transitional phase in the American political novel. In them a new theme was added to that of political corruption: the rise of leftist and radical forces. _Oil!_ (1926) focuses on Bunny Ross’s political journey to the far Left. Bunny’s father, J. Arnold Ross, is one of the tycoons who selects, pays for, and elects an American president. Naming names and placing places, Sinclair sends his characters into the campaign of 1920. Verne Roscoe says that he is negotiating with Barney Brockway of “the Ohio gang.” Sinclair writes that “he made exactly the right offers, and paid his certified checks to exactly the right men,” and Warren Harding was nominated. The fifty million dollars poured into the campaign by the oil interests (according to Sinclair) helped to finish the job. The account of the naval reserve oil lease scandals which follows makes Sinclair’s position on the activities of a powerful lobby very clear. More an exposé than a work of art, the novel describes attempts to hinder the organization of the oil workers and the strikes and strike-breaking which follow. The book ends with an attack upon an evil power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor.