The
novel upon which the acclaimed film There Will Be
Blood was loosely based was written by Upton Sinclair, a
socialist muckraker best
known for his novel that revolutionized the regulation of the meatpacking
industry in America, The Jungle. Oil! is
the story of Joe Ross, one of the pioneers of the
Oil industry, a person who
came be to be known as an independent wildcat.
The novel opens in the early part of the 1920s as Joe Ross and his
teenage
son Bunny Ross are heading to Beach City, California, where oil has
been struck. Joe Ross is a kind of
fictional stand-in for Upton Sinclair; Sinclair writes his novel as an
education about how the oil industry was run, and Ross is intent on
enlightening to his son the very same thing.
Unlike the film, the actual focal character of Sinclair’s novel is the
son, Bunny Ross.
It is through Bunny’s eyes that the reader sees both the
underhanded dealing in the form of bribery to politicians and mainpulation of
dreams of wealth of those landowners who lease their land for drilling to his
father. One of the many local townsfolk
that Bunny meets is Paul Watkins, a teenager like himself, who is in rebelling
against his evangelical father. Through
Paul, Bunny Ross learns about the reality of that part of America that doesn’t
achieve success through the rise of industry and faces poverty and hard
times.
As the story progresses, Joe Ross becomes an oil tycoon,
while Bunny learns from the corrupt process what it means to develop a conscience. It presents an authentic look at how Joe
rises from wildcatter to become a part of the oiled machinery of the syndicates
that soon control the oil business. Eventually,
Bunny also becomes a very successful businessman, while also embracing
socialist concepts, such as taking the part of workers in a labor strike and
trying to launch a liberal newspaper at Southern Pacific University. Into the conflict that arises between Ross and
Bunny walks another major character, Eli Watkins, the brother of Paul Watkins.
Eli is an Elmer Gantry type evangelist with a subplot based on the real life
female evangelist preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. Like her, Eli arranges a fake disappearance
in order to cover up an illicit love affair.
Meanwhile, Paul Watkins remains
friends with Bunny and joins him in the fight for workers’ rights against the
capitalist machinery oiled as much by blood as by Texas Teas.
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