In 1907, Upton Sinclair looked forward 93 years and imagined the year 2000, when capitalism would find its zenith with the construction of The Pleasure Palace, a glittering half-mile-high structure in the middle of Central Park. During the grand opening of the towering building, a scientific experiment with radiumite explodes killing everybody throughout the world except eleven of the people at the Pleasure Palace. They escape the deadly rays by flying high in the sky in a revolutionary 1000-mph airplane called "The Monarch of the Air!" The fortunate eleven survivors struggle to rebuild their lives by creating a capitalistic society. After that fails, along with several other inept efforts, they create a successful utopian society on the lush grounds of a grand country estate in the Pocantico Hills above the Hudson River. Sinclair's life-long vision, "The Cooperative Commonwealth," reigns happily forever after, in this classic of the literature of political imagination.
UPTON SINCLAIR was the leading socialist American writer of the 20th century, publishing nearly a hundred books before his death in 1968. His work includes dozens of historical novels, numerous non-fiction works of muckraking journalism, socialist political tracts, drama, poetry, and several volumes of autobiography. Sinclair was also a socialist political organizer and was nearly elected governor of California in 1934. His most famous novel, The Jungle, published in 1906, exposed the horrific conditions in the US meatpacking industry, and is still a best selling book today. Jack London called it "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery." Sinclair won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Dragon's Teeth, a novel set during the Nazi takeover of Germany during the 1930s. Oil!, his Southern California political satire, was the inspiration for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood. Numerous other works by Sinclair were adapted for film, television, and the stage. Sinclair engaged with and supported progressive and socialist work of all kinds. He founded a utopian community, edited works by other progressive writers and artists, was arrested at numerous protests, and traveled and lectured widely in support of progressive causes. His novel The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000 and the collection he edited The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of Social Protest were both reissued by Seven Stories Press in 2000 and 2020, respectively.
