Both in life and in writings Sinclair has attempted, as did Dickens, to be the persuading intermediary between the contending classes. With admirable sweetness of temper, considering his lack of success, he has continued to argue that the owning class should perform a revolution by consent, that the capitalist should give up his profits and power in exchange for citizenship in an industrial democracy. But in the novels that he has so prodigally brought forth year after year since the publication of The Jungle, the lamb of his Christian spirit has rarely been able peacefully to lie down with the lion of his Marxian vocabulary. As a result, although Sinclair is the only one of the Socialist novelists who continued … to write Socialist novels, his is the classic case among them for unresolved discrepancies between his fictional structure and the "message" that he is trying to convey…. (pp...