The Moneychangers

· Cosimo, Inc.
Ebook
206
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

Upton Sinclair won a Pulitzer Prize for his notorious 1906 novel The Jungle, a fictionalized account of the barbaric conditions of the men and women who worked in Chicago's meatpacking industry. And just as the horrific circumstances he exposed in that book more than a century ago appear to be recurring in our fast-food nation, so do those he highlights in his 1908 novel, the cautionary tale The Moneychangers. First published in 1908, this is the story of a small band of Wall Street players who plot to outmaneuver their rivals via financial schemes that sound all too familiar in today's chaotic economic environment: shell companies and creative accounting lure unwitting investors to prop up secretly bankrupt corporations, prompting a stock market crash, a bank run, and a dramatic rise in unemployment. As with The Jungle, this is based on real events-the Wall Street crash of 1907-and reads as startlingly prescient today, as the very crimes Sinclair strove to highlight plague society once again.

About the author

Upton Sinclair, a lifelong vigorous socialist, first became well known with a powerful muckraking novel, The Jungle, in 1906. Refused by five publishers and finally published by Sinclair himself, it became an immediate bestseller, and inspired a government investigation of the Chicago stockyards, which led to much reform. In 1967 he was invited by President Lyndon Johnson to "witness the signing of the Wholesome Meat Act, which will gradually plug loopholes left by the first Federal meat inspection law" (N.Y. Times), a law Sinclair had helped to bring about. Newspapers, colleges, schools, churches, and industries have all been the subject of a Sinclair attack, analyzing and exposing their evils. Sinclair was not really a novelist, but a fearless and indefatigable journalist-crusader. All his early books are propaganda for his social reforms. When regular publishers boycotted his work, he published himself, usually at a financial loss. His 80 or so books have been translated into 47 languages, and his sales abroad, especially in the former Soviet Union, have been enormous.

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