Dragon's Teeth
by Upton Sinclair
Summary
Lanny Budd is the grandson of an American arms manufacturer, the son of expatriate money, a picture dealer by trade and a socialist by conviction, and he moves through Europe between 1929 and 1934 with the access those contradictions buy him. He dines with people who are financing Hitler and summers with people who will be destroyed by him, and the novel's method is to walk this perfectly placed witness through the Nazi seizure of power one season at a time.
The first half is the gathering: the Wall Street crash, German elections, drawing room arguments in which fascism is still something clever people believe can be managed. Sinclair gives real figures walk on parts and lets the reader hear the rationalisations at full length, which is the book's most chilling effect now, since every one of them has aged into familiarity.
The second half turns thriller. The Jewish family Lanny is tied to by marriage falls into Nazi hands, and he goes into Germany to get one of them out, an errand that runs through bribery, negotiation with men who enjoy being negotiated with, his own arrest, and a spell in the cells that strips the last comfort off the story.
It is a long book and an unashamedly instructive one; Sinclair always wrote to explain the world, and subtlety was never the tool.
Best for readers who want to watch the 1930s happen at eye level, in a novel written while the events were still news and the ending was genuinely unknown.
Historical Context & Significance
Dragon's Teeth won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1943, in the middle of the war it had seen coming. Time credited it with making history clear and human, and the New York Times called it Sinclair's finest.
Upton Sinclair was then perhaps the most famous muckraker alive, nearly four decades on from The Jungle, the 1906 meatpacking novel that helped force federal food law, and fresh from his 1934 campaign for governor of California, which he lost by a wide margin despite the EPIC movement behind it. The Lanny Budd books were his last great project: eleven novels published between 1940 and 1953 under the series title World's End, walking one impossibly connected man through every hinge of the century, of which Dragon's Teeth is the third.
The series was enormously popular, then vanished from print and reputation almost completely, and the Pulitzer is now the main thing that keeps this volume visible. The title is the old myth made policy: teeth sown in the ground, and armed men coming up out of it.