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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning series, the first four novels featuring an American who comes of age during the turbulent years of the early 20th century. In World's End, Lanning "Lanny" Budd's language skills and talent for decoding messages are in high demand as WWI bursts over Europe. When the hostilities conclude, Lanny joins the Paris Peace Conference as the assistant to a geographer asked by President Woodrow Wilson to redraw the map of Europe. In Between Two Worlds, Lanny travels to Italy and witnesses the brutal charisma of Benito Mussolini. Meanwhile, in Germany, the failed Beer Hall Putsch led by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party strikes an ominous note. After two star-crossed love affairs, Lanny marries a wealthy heiress and returns to the U.S. just in time for the 1929 stock market crash. Winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Dragon's Teeth captures the nightmarish march toward the Second World War. In Germany to visit relatives, Lanny encounters a disturbing atmosphere of hatred and jingoism stoked by the Nazi Party and meets the group's fanatical leader, Adolf Hitler. But Lanny's gravest fear is the threat to his Jewish friends and family—a threat that impels him to risk his life to rescue his loved ones from a terrible fate. "Few works of fiction are more fun to read; fewer still make history half as clear, or as human." —Time "When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to [Sinclair's] novels." —George Bernard Shaw "[The] most faithful portrait of that period that has been done." —H. G. Wells
Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state’s ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism, and the eleven novels in Pulitzer Prize–winning Lanny Budd series.
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