No. 43

Co-Op--Upton Sinclair--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

When the literary history of the present era is eventually written, the strange and flighty career of Upton Sinclair is likely to provide one of its most picturesque footnotes. He is as much a literary oddity and popular favorite as General Lew Wallace, who wrote Ben Hur while Governor of New Mexico, and who was distracted from his romance by the lawless exploits of Billy the Kid. Belonging to that class of writers who, unable to choose between the world of affairs and the literary life, have attempted both and succeeded in neither, Sinclair is known in political circles as a novelist, in literary circles as a politician, whose promise or threat is always greater than his accomplishment.

Last week the contradictory novelist-politician offered his 43rd volume in the form of a story of the self-help co-operative movement of California. It is a typical Sinclair novel. It has a good deal of the sunny, buoyant, irrepressible uplift spirit that has distinguished all his writing since he published The Jungle in 1906, the journalistic flare that keeps even his crusading potboilers rattling along at a good clip, a large cast of those singleminded, two-dimensional, easily-stirred individuals who seem to be more frequently encountered in Sinclair's fiction than anywhere else. The co-operative at San Sebas tian, Calif, grows out of a discussion in 1932 among a group of unemployed living in shanties they have made of sewer pipes. A one-time prosperous publicity agent, a ruined broker, a "wobbly," a Texas farmer pool their potential resources and, after a meeting, get enough supplies on credit to start work. A one time Socialist and Alaska miner named Sig Soren persuades old Theophilus Fleming, utilities tycoon, that the movement holds no threat to business. The co-operatives grow, getting recruits from a sharecrop per's family, a girl who escapes from white slavers, an anti-Fascist Italian barber, religious fanatics, diet faddists, a young doctor, disruptive Communists, well-to-do radicals. The EPIC campaign shakes it and the contradictory government pol icy toward self-help co-operatives nearly wrecks it. Sig Soren (now happily mar ried to the girl who escaped from the white slavers) visits Washington, confers with President Roosevelt, and the book ends with his wondering what stand the President will take on the co-operative question.

Although few U. S. readers are likely to take Co-Op as much more than an ingenious tract, it plainly reveals the source of Sinclair's international reputation. With a gift for simplifying complex political questions, he writes in a field that interests politically-conscious Europeans, and one which few U. S. novelists have touched, Bitterly resenting the neglect of his achievements by serious U. S. critics, Upton Sinclair usually counters by mentioning the wide circulation of his books abroad. The Jungle is the most widely-read U. S. novel since Uncle Tom's Cabin. Oil has been translated into 30 languages, including Esperanto. A bibliography published in 1930 listed 525 translations of Sinclair's works in 34 nations, and 200 titles have been added since then. A library census in Sweden established Sinclair as the most popular author in that country, and a newspaper vote in Australia showed him runner-up to Dickens. Despite such far-flung successes, he has had to publish many of his U. S. works himself, says that he lost $30,000 distributing The Brass Check after every publisher rejected it, and was in debt for ten years as a result.

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