Oil!

  • Author Upton Sinclair
  • Narrator Grover Gardner
  • Publisher Blackstone Publishing
  • Run Time 19 hours and 49 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Classic fiction.
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What to expect

This book is the inspiration for the Academy Award-nominated film, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis.

As he did so masterfully in The Jungle, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Upton Sinclair interweaves social criticism with human tragedy to create an unforgettable portrait of Southern California’s early oil industry.

Enraged by the oil scandals of the Harding administration in the 1920s, Sinclair tells a gripping tale of avarice, corruption, and class warfare, featuring a cavalcade of characters, including senators, oil magnates, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist. At the center of the novel are an oil developer and his son. As the story moves forward, the divide between father and son grows until the young man is fighting the very industry that brought his father great success.

Sinclair’s glorious 1927 epic endures as one of our most powerful American novels of social injustice.

Critics Review

  • “A tremendous piece of work.”

    Nation

  • “He does his little bit of muckraking…but the glorious story of the oil man and his son rushes on. It is a marvelous panorama of Southern California life. It is storytelling with an edge on it.”

    New Republic

  • “Sinclair’s 1927 novel did for California’s oil industry what The Jungle did for Chicago’s meat-packing factories.”

    Library Journal

  • “Grover Gardner plays it straight in a solid and believable performance that will engage listeners with its simplicity and earnestness…Gardner never fails to deliver with passion and vigor.”

    AudioFile

  • “Grover Gardner does a superb job narrating, always conveying the humanity of the main characters while capturing the humor of the many caricatured stereotypes.”

    SoundCommentary.com

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