Name: The Metropolis
Price: 54.65 RON
Availability: InStock
Author: Upton Sinclair
ISBN: 9781517755348

Metropolis

Upton Sinclair

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 24 mar 2009

In this 1907 novel about the extravagant life of New York City’s high society, the author of The Jungle, presents a richly detailed portrait of the wealthy elite of "The Metropolis."

Allan Montague, a lawyer of thirty, moves to New York City from Mississippi, along with his mother and cousin Alice, to join his younger brother Oliver, who had taken up residence there several years before. The newcomers soon discover that Oliver has become a highly networked member of a fast-paced social circuit comprising some of the most powerful members of the business class. Oliver wastes no time in introducing Allan and Alice into this exclusive group in the hope that they will all prosper through their connections.

Sinclair devotes much of the novel to depictions of the profligate and jaded party life of the very rich, who spend vast sums of money on entertainment and new toys to relieve their boredom. Expensive cars (still a novelty at this time), lavishly furnished limousines and private trains, sumptuous dinners attended by liveried servants, tailor-made clothing costing thousands of dollars are described with meticulous attention to the enormous cost of it all. Sinclair also spares no detail in describing the rampant alcoholism, marital affairs, malicious gossip, backstabbing, and shallow values of this set.

When Allan agrees to represent a wealthy client in a suit against powerful insurance interests, he becomes caught in a web of influence and secret dealings that threaten his recently established social standing and the wellbeing of his whole family.

This early 20th-century version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous with a cynical edge and a socialist reformer’s perspective provides a fascinating glimpse into the elite social life of the very wealthy of New York before the Great Depression.

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Notă biografică

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (1878 - 1968) was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckraking novel The Jungle, which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free press" in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence". He is also well remembered for the line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." He used this line in speeches and the book about his campaign for governor as a way to explain why the editors and publishers of the major newspapers in California would not treat seriously his proposals for old age pensions and other progressive reforms. Upton Sinclair was considered a force of nature -- being not only prolific in his novel-writing but a political force of decided influence. Unknown to many of his admirers, Sinclair also wrote adventure fiction, under the name Ensign Clark Fitch, U.S.N.