Oil!

The road runs out ahead over the valley, fourteen feet of grey concrete laid down like ribbon, and a boy in the passenger seat watches his father take it at speed, in love with the engine and with the man at the wheel. That ride is the whole novel in miniature: Upton Sinclair puts you inside the pleasure of American money before he shows you what pays for it, the leases signed by ranchers who do not know what they are sitting on, the cabinet officers bought with cash in a satchel, the strike broken with clubs in the fields at Paradise.