Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

BOOK REVIEWS - John C. Chalberg: Lehel Vadon: Upton Sinclair in Hungary. Eger, Hungary: College Press, 1993. 125 pp

Hollywood, Charlie Chaplin and a very few others excepted. In fact, movie magnate Louis B. Mayer led the forces against Sinclair. Studios threatened to move to Florida if Sinclair won. Fake newsreels were deployed against him. In sum, a then astonishing $10,000,000 was spent to defeat him. In this instance, money did a good deal of talking. Sinclair lost by approximately 350,000 votes out of 2.5 million cast. Never again would he run for elective office. If the career of Upton Sinclair, the politician, was over, the career of Sinclair, the writer, was not. Professor Vadon chronicles the publications and Hungarian of many more Upton Sinclair books, including his autobiography, which received two Hungarian translations and which H. L. Mencken thought was Sinclair's best work. But Upton Sinclair's popularity in Hungary was not necessarily without interruption. After 1949 serious, sustained criticism of his works could be found in Hungarian periodicals and scholarly journals. Suddenly, Vadon writes, Sinclair was being dismissed as a "vacillating pseudo-writer, a gutless unprincipled careerist with the political views of a fascist." Such harsh attacks were followed by something arguably worse: silence. Between the late 1940s and the late 1950s virtually nothing was written about Upton Sinclair in Hungary. Why? It is Vadon's contention that the Cold War was doing its best to freeze out all non-communist, non-marxist writers, the socialist Upton Sinclair included. In effect, he was put on the "blacklist," thereby denying the Hungarian reading public access to his works. Not until the 1960s and Hungarian thaw of the larger Cold War was he "restored to grace." Among the first Upton Sinclair books to find their way back into the hands of Hungarian readers were the eleven volumes (and 7,364 pages) of the Lanny Budd series. As an overall literary work this series was, in Vadon's choice words, "worse than the best of Sinclair's art," but nonetheless readers in Hungary and elsewhere "greedily devoured" each new volume. Nazi sympathizers and Soviet sympathizers alternately took Sinclair to task for his alleged anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet leanings. As we 173