One of these is his temperamental attitude toward life. He is recognized as being fundamentally a Puritan; and Puritanism (for reasons to be gone into at length later on) is just now very unpopular among the American intelligentsia. Sinclair has, indeed, by virtue of his passionate realism, his poetic and epic vision, and his critical and revolutionary thought, far transcended in his writings the limitations of the Puritan point of view. Yet it is perceptible at times, and to Americans in revolt against Puritanism it counts heavily against him. Again, his attitude toward our machine civilization is one which Americans find it difficult to understand--since it is neither the popular one of uncritical adulation, nor the aristocratic one of reactionary sentimental protest against the machine age as such. Both these literary attitudes are well understood in America; but that a writer may be an idealist, and yet be a cordial believer in this modern machine civilization of ours, founding all his hopes for ultimate justice and beauty and happiness upon machinery’s essential and revolutionary possibilities, is still to the American mind a paradox. III. Nevertheless, there are unmistakable signs in recent American criticism of a growing respect for Upton Sinclair. Time’s perspective has given a new dignity to the gallant literary movement with which his name is associated. It is remembered that Europe’s greatest critic, Georg Brandes, once said: “I find three present-day American novelists worth reading--Frank Norris, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.” The literary movement of which these men were the leaders came (for reasons to be recounted later) upon evil days, and seemed to end in discouragement and chagrin. But now that it has very recently been revived in the hands of younger writers, it is remembered that during that long interval Sinclair remained its single unfaltering and powerful voice. He can now be seen as a representative pioneer figure of an ambitious interpretive effort of which the culmination is still to come in the American literature of the future. Of so much honor, in his own country, this prophet is now assured. And it is certain that, as the kind of literature comes into its own which Frank Norris, Jack London and Upton Sinclair first showed us how to write in America, his literary stature will, like theirs, increase in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen. We shall know that he was of the race of giants, and forgive him those faults which we perceive to-day. Meanwhile, his faults as well as his virtues will receive due attention in this little book. But it may as well be said frankly that they will be dealt with as the faults of a great writer, and analyzed with the respect due to him as such. It should also be remarked that the biographical details in these pages are intended to be subordinate to the critical study of his development as a certain kind of writer--a describer, critic and prophet of modern industrial America.