The Judge Book

"You could not be indifferent to the war, you could not be of two minds about it. And yet--Jimmie Higgins was of two minds! He wanted to beat back the Huns, who had made all this fearful mess; but also he wanted to beat the profiteers who were making messes at home."

I think a lot of Americans don't realize just how tumultuous the beginning of the 20th century actually was. Anarchism, socialism, labor unrest, rapacious imperialism, military buildup - and Jimmie Higgins is dead center in the middle of it.

This "bowed, undernourished little man" meets presidential candidates royalty, incites strikes wherever he goes, loses everything multiple times - it's exhausting, really, but damn engaging.

This is the most complex novel by Sinclair that I've read. I love Sinclair and I'm a socialist myself but he often strikes me as naive, if not willfully so. This novel seems to reflect Sinclair's attempt at reflecting the world back to itself through the eyes of an eagerly devoted proletarian idealist. Imagine Forrest Gump as a devoted working class agitator in the 1910s and you're probably not even close - my favorite Upton Sinclair novel, by far.