I respect [Upton Sinclair] because he says exactly what he thinks, even if it often sounds foolish to others and will eventually sound foolish to himself; he is willing to confess his mistakes. I respect him because he has acquired a great deal of sober wisdom about political affairs, and because he talks better sense than the people who laugh at him. And I respect him, too, because he has retained an old-fashioned and innocent love for mankind….

Perhaps [his] colorless picture of human motives was less of a fault in [the] earlier novels that I haven't read. But [in Wide Is the Gate] he is dealing with a period of moral dissolution, marked by the reappearance of deliberate evil—of Satan himself, you might say, stalking the earth in a form that he hadn't assumed since the Middle Ages. Sinclair doesn't believe in Satan; at heart he...