General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20267 min read

Oil!

Oil! is a novel by Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), published in 1926–27, that follows Bunny Ross, the son of a Southern California oil tycoon, as he moves between his father's cutthroat business world and his growing sympathy for workers and socialist ideals.¹ Set against the backdrop of the Teapot Dome scandal era, it is regarded as the first major American novel about the oil industry and is widely considered one of Sinclair's finest works.² It is best known today as the loose source material for Paul Thomas Anderson's Academy Award-winning film There Will Be Blood (2007).³

Key fact	Detail
Author	Upton Sinclair, 1878–1968¹
Publication	United States: The Author, 1926, copyright 1927; serialized in the Daily Worker from June 2, 1926 to March 7, 1927¹^•⁴
Setting	Southern California, roughly the first two and a half decades of the twentieth century, through World War I and the oil boom²
Main characters	James Ross Jr. ("Bunny"), heir to an oil fortune; his father J. Arnold Ross; Paul Watkins, a poor farm boy drawn to radical politics⁴^•⁵
Genre	Political fiction; described by scholars as an industrial novel, strike novel, road novel, and Bildungsroman⁶
Censorship	Banned in Boston for its frank discussion of sexuality, including Bunny's sister's abortion, and censured for references to birth control⁷^•²
Film adaptation	There Will Be Blood (2007), directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, uses roughly a third of the novel and changes character names⁵

Origins and serialization

Sinclair had made his name in 1906 with The Jungle, an indictment of the Chicago meatpacking industry whose publication helped lead to the Pure Food and Drug Act that year.³ The Harding administration and the Teapot Dome scandals were, in the account of one literary survey, the direct catalysts for his reformist passion behind Oil!, and the novel's plot of an oilman bribing national officials to gain Navy oil leases is clearly meant to evoke that scandal.²^•⁸

The title carries its own history. Between June 2, 1926, and March 7, 1927, Sinclair published the novel in the Daily Worker, the national newspaper of the Communist Party USA, under the plain title Oil. He then learned that Walter Gilkyson had already published a novel called Oil in 1924, so Sinclair added the exclamation mark, which skirted the copyright on the earlier title and, in the reading of one critic, advertised oil's power to spark extreme emotions.⁴

Sinclair drew the first chapter, "The Ride," from personal experience, writing it after a drive he and Craig, his wife, made alongside a major oilman hoping to purchase a pair of Signal Hill lots the couple possessed, close to Long Beach.⁹

Plot and characters

The novel is a coming-of-age story of two boys who grow into young men. Bunny Ross, the sensitive heir to an energy fortune, early alarms his father by showing sympathy for the underdog; after university and experiments in love, including one with a famous film star, he develops labor and socialist ideas and opposes his father during a great oil strike.⁴^•¹⁰ Against the background of the century's first two and a half decades, punctuated by World War I, the book climaxes with the death of Paul, leaving Bunny a wiser, though not necessarily fully matured, hero.²

Sinclair worked to avoid one-sidedness. He developed the members of the Ross household as full characters with their own principles, troubles, and even virtues, and the cast ranges across oil tycoons, bankers, independent developers, union and strike leaders, oilfield workers, Bolsheviks, silent-era Hollywood stars, and a fire-and-brimstone evangelist.² The novel follows Bunny Ross's political and moral development amid conflict between oil capitalists and organized labor.²^•¹⁵

Themes and style

Through the two young men, Sinclair contrasts laissez-faire capitalism with socialism, and the novel dramatizes a debate on the American left between radical approaches to social change, represented by the communism of Paul Watkins, and more moderate approaches, represented by the socialism of the Menzies family and Professor Irwin.²^•⁷ Unlike the unremitting squalor of The Jungle, Oil! is set in sunny Southern California and narrated in a brisk style punctuated by Roaring Twenties slang.²

Refinement as theme. The critic Michael Tondre argues that the novel's central word is refinement: crude is literally fractionated into gasoline, kerosene, benzene, and naphtha in a refinery scene Bunny visits, and the novel then follows oil's diffusion into modern art, entertainment, and news. The book never defines what oil is or depicts it as inherently evil; oil appears as a process, a web of material and cultural relations unfolding in time.⁴

Later scholarship has placed the novel in the energy humanities. Stephanie LeMenager, a scholar of environmental literature, describes Oil! as a type of peak-oil fiction, written as a warning against global petromodernity from around the moment of peak oil discovery in the United States in the late 1920s.¹¹ In petrofiction studies the novel has come to be regarded as something of an ur-text, cited in the introductions of numerous scholarly publications.⁶

Reception and censorship

The novel was banned in Boston, not for its political ideas but for its frank discussion of sexuality, particularly Bunny's sister's abortion.⁷ Sinclair himself joked about the commercial value of censorship in a 1927 New Yorker piece, describing how the printers telegraphed for a carload of paper for a new edition while the royalties from the first three days' sales paid his expenses to travel from California to Boston to protest the censor's action.¹²

Contemporary reviewers noted the book's scale. The Spectator in August 1927 called it a very long novel that is at once a love story and a tract for the times, fascinating as a panorama and, in the main, convincing as an indictment.¹⁰ The Southern Californian historian Carey McWilliams praised it as "a fine panoramic picture of southern California, and woefully true," and David Wyatt later placed it among the "big California novels," between Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901) and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939).¹³ David Denby, writing in The New Yorker, called it Sinclair's "most readable" novel.³ The critic Louis Menand, in a 2006 New Yorker essay, judged it probably Sinclair's second-best book and certainly his most readable, noting that no novelist has written better, or more, about oil derricks.⁸

There Will Be Blood

The 2007 Paramount Vantage film There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, credits the novel as its source material and drove a revival of interest in a book that had been largely forgotten.³^•⁶ The adaptation is loose. The oil pioneer Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, corresponds to J. Arnold Ross in the novel, while Paul and Eli Sunday, both played by Paul Dano, correspond to the Watkinses; not even the names survived. The film's 158 minutes are drawn from perhaps a third of the 548 pages, and it almost completely omits the element that would have mattered most to the committed socialist author, the fight between organized labor and the industrial establishment. Where the novel frames the Ross-Watkins conflict around labor rights, the film recasts the clash between Plainview and Sunday as a matter of faith.⁵ Reviewers judged Anderson's film a more refined work of art than Sinclair's rather baggy book, while crediting the novel's energetic humor and Dickensian ironic voice.¹⁴

Penguin Books is now the sole publisher of the novel, which remains in print in a 560-page paperback edition.³ Project Gutenberg released a public-domain transcription in 2023.¹

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026