Synopses & Reviews
There Will Be Blood wins a 2008 Golden Globes Award. Read about it here.
There Will Be Blood wins two 2008 Academy Awards. Read about it here.
Penguin Books is proud to now be the sole publisher of Oil!, the classic 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair. After writing The Jungle, his scathing indictment of the meatpacking industry, Sinclair turned his sights on the early days of the California oil industry in a highly entertaining story featuring a cavalcade of characters including senators, oil magnets, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist.
This lively and panoramic book, which was recently cited by David Denby in the New Yorker as being Sinclair’s “most readable” novel, is now the inspiration for the Paramount Vantage major motion picture, There Will Be Blood. It is the long-awaited film from Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the most admired filmmakers working today whose previous movies, Boogie Nights and Magnolia were both multiple Academy Award nominees. The movie stars Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York, My Left Foot) and Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine).
Paramount Vantage will be releasing the film in New York and Los Angeles on December 26, 2007 and go nationwide in January. This is the same company responsible for Babel and A Mighty Heart and the current releases, Into the Wild, Margot at the Wedding, and The Kite Runner.
As wars rage on in the oil region and as anxiety over natural resources rise, the subject of this book, which celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2007, is more timely than ever.
Review
“A classic tale of greed and corruption”—
Eric Schlosser, author of
Fast Food Nation “[Oil! is] probably his second best book and certainly his most readable.”—The New Yorker
“Anderson's film is a true American saga—one that rivals Giant and Citizen Kane in our popular lore as origin stories about how we came to be the people we are… Daniel Day-Lewis is at his brilliant best as the story's Daniel Plainview, a man whose humanity diminishes as his fortunes increase.”—Variety
Synopsis
The classic novel that inspired the Academy award-winning film, There Will Be Blood. Penguin Books is proud to now be the sole publisher of Oil , the classic 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair. After writing The Jungle, his scathing indictment of the meatpacking industry, Sinclair turned his sights on the early days of the California oil industry in a highly entertaining story featuring a cavalcade of characters including senators, oil magnets, Hollywood film starlets, and a crusading evangelist.
This lively and panoramic book, which was recently cited by David Denby in the New Yorker as being Sinclair's "most readable" novel, is now the inspiration for the Paramount Vantage major motion picture, There Will Be Blood. It is the long-awaited film from Paul Thomas Anderson, one of the most admired filmmakers working today whose previous movies, Boogie Nights and Magnolia were both multiple Academy Award nominees. The movie stars Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York, My Left Foot) and Paul Dano (Little Miss Sunshine).
Paramount Vantage will be releasing the film in New York and Los Angeles on December 26, 2007 and go nationwide in January. This is the same company responsible for Babel and A Mighty Heart and the current releases, Into the Wild, Margot at the Wedding, and The Kite Runner.
As wars rage on in the oil region and as anxiety over natural resources rise, the subject of this book, which celebrates its 80th anniversary in 2007, is more timely than ever.
Synopsis
Upton Sinclair's classic revelatory novel about turn-of-the-century business and immigrant labor practices--with an afterword by Dr. Barry Sears, the New York Times bestselling author of The Zone.
Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant in search of a better life, faces instead an epic struggle for survival. His story of factory life in Chicago in the early twentieth century is a saga of barbarous working conditions, crushing poverty, crime, disease, and despair.
Upton Sinclairs vivid depiction of the horrors of Chicagos stockyards and slaughterhouses aroused such public indignation that a government investigation was called, eventually resulting in the passage of pure food laws. More than a hundred years later, The Jungle continues to pack the same emotional power it did when it was first published.
About the Author
Upton Sinclair (18781968) was born in Baltimore and began writing dime novels to pay his way through the College of the City of New York. While doing graduate work at Columbia University, he wrote six novels, including
King Midas (1901),
The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903), and
Manassas (1904). His masterwork,
The Jungle (1906), aided the passage of pure food laws and won him wide acclaim. Active throughout his life in socialist causes, he invested the money he made from
The Jungle in a Utopian experiment, the Helicon Hall Colony in Englewood, New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he ran unsuccessfully for public office and waged an antipoverty campaign. Among his later works was
Dragons Teeth (1942), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.
Dr. Barry Sears, a widely published scientist and pioneer in the field of medical research, holds twelve U. S. patents in drug delivery and hormonal control technology. He is the author of numerous books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller The Zone.
Dr. Alicia Mischa Renfroe (JD, PhD) is an Associate Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. She teaches courses in American literature, Law and Literature, and American Realism and Naturalism. She has published essays on Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Dean Howells, and Louisa May Alcott. Her edition of Daviss A Law Unto Herself is forthcoming from Nebraska University Presss Legacies of Nineteenth Century Women Writers series.