The Moneychangers

In this fictional account of the events and the key players involved in the Wall Street panic of 1907, the famous author of The Jungle depicts the glittering society of New York's fabulously wealthy, for whom money is not the object of existence, just the means of wielding power. In the midst of the alluring lifestyle of the high rollers, with their debutante balls, sumptuous summer homes in Newport, and their retinue of servants, a newcomer from the South arrives. The strikingly beautiful Lucy Dupree seeks entrance into high society through her childhood friend, Allan Montague, who is now a successful lawyer working in the city. Despite Allan's attempts to protect her, the naive Lucy soon finds herself caught in a jealous rivalry between two of the wealthiest and most unscrupulous powerbrokers. Their fight to destroy each other using high-stake financial manipulations precipitates a major Wall Street collapse and puts Lucy into great peril.

Sinclair has created an exciting page-turner full of vivid characters showing rapacious capitalists at their very worst. This novel, exposing abuses that no newspaper dared to print, provides fascinating parallels to our own time of wild investor speculation and politics corrupted by money.

Upton Sinclair (1878 - 1968) achieved early fame for his novel The Jungle (1906).?Intended to lead to improved working conditions for the exploited immigrant workers in the meat-packing industry, The Jungle led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, to protect consumers. Publication of the novel placed Sinclair in the ranks of the early twentieth-century muckraking writers who used their pens to expose corruption and social injustice. He used the royal-ties from The Jungle to help found a cooperative-living venture, Helicon Hall, in Englewood, New Jersey.?

His interest in social and industrial reform underlies most of his over eighty books, including the topical and polemical novels The Moneychangers (1908), King Coal (1917), Oil! (1927), and Boston (1928); a cycle of eleven historical novels about a contemporary American, Lanny Budd; and many political and social studies such as The Profits of Religion (1918) and The Goose-Step (1923). Sinclair won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for Dragon's Teeth, the third novel in the Lanny Budd series.?

For many years he was active in California politics.?In 1934 he received the Democ-ratic nomination for governor of California, running on the Socialist reform platform EPIC (End Poverty In California).?He founded the American Civil Liberties Union in California.