There Will Be Blood: How Upton Sinclair's Oil! Inspired the Acclaimed Film

Comparing Joe and Bunny Ross to Daniel Plainview and H.W.

Seeing the word "Oil!" on the face of a book probably was the equivalent of grabbing someone by the bow tie and telling someone right in the face to pay the hell attention. In 1927, things were fairly happy-go-lucky in America with the stock market being bullish and people not worrying about the potentials of things going wrong. California (or at least Hollywood) might have been the most hedonistic during the 1920's, too. That's where author/muckraker Upton Sinclair decided to live right before WWI started in America, when Hollywood was on the cusp of taking over the southern regions of the state and when big business prospects were starting to brew. Once those high-end industries were hard to ignore, Sinclair went after them in his books.

Before he did that, he was already quite well-known in not only the writing world but also in Washington, D.C. for his revealing "The Jungle" that managed to get sweeping changes in how meat was processed in this country (hence the forming of the FDA). This was back in the day when a book could get into the hands of the President of the United States (in the case of "The Jungle"--Teddy Roosevelt), create major concern and then the President actually taking action to make the difference in the betterment of the population. By 1927, when Sinclair was writing about the dangers of how the oil industry was corrupting America's population enamored with big business--the action of the President of the United States had obviously become useless when our government encouraged free enterprise.

Well, Sinclair understood that even his enacting of change with "The Jungle" couldn't lead to all the changes that he really wanted by writing the book in the first place. Getting fair wages and overall better living conditions for meat plant workers was his goal when he wrote "The Jungle." When that didn't happen, he probably didn't expect to reform society with "Oil!" Nevertheless, he brought a lot of beauty to muckraking behemoth industries permeating America. Giving a compelling statement about the direction of big business with "Oil!" possibly even exceeded his work on "The Jungle."