Hitchens

Whenever I read anything by Christopher Hitchens I feel that I haven't been educated well. He mentions authors whose works I think I know quite well but writes about them in such an elegant and stylish way that I feel inadequate to talk or write about them any more. Take his piece (a review of a book by Fred Kaplan who, if he made the mistake of reading the review, might have decided to give up writing now) on Mark Twain. He brings up stuff that I never knew yet I have read a bit of Twain at various times in my life: "Tom Sawyer" and "Hucklebury Finn" for example; "Quaker City" and "Innocents abroad" - never heard of them. Then there's Twain's atheism. Never imagined he was so hostile to organised religion. Hitchens writes; "What is it about Twain that made him not just an agnostic or an atheist but a probable sympathiser with the Devil's party?"
The review of Kaplan's book is followed by a review of Upton Sinclair's most famous novel, "The Jungle". Now, I read this book a long time ago and it had the desired effect on me of making me believe that being "on the left" was the right (excuse the pun) place to be. Hitchens described Sinclair as a "socialist realist" which, he admits, is a bit unkind since the two words put together "evoke the tractor opera, the granite-jawed proletarian sculptor, the cultural and literary standards of Commissar Zhdanov...". He compares the work with Dickens and Zola expressing a notion that it is a greater work of damning the powers that be, or were anyway, than either of those two writers were capable of. Mmmm! "Hard Times" ? well, yes, I agree. But "Germinal"? Contentious surely.
Upton Sinclair has gone out of fashion - though there was a film made a few years ago based on one of his novels, "Oil": "There will be blood". Good film but too long, I thought. He's been out of fashion for some time; maybe this has to do with the advances societies have made in making working places less hell-holeish than they once were.
I wrote to Cardiff library a couple of decades ago urging them to put a few of his books on their shelves. They may have heeded what I suggested for some time later there was the complete set of his Lanny Budd books available to borrow. I borrowed one and didn't finish it.