Another Pamela; or, Virtue Still Rewarded

New York: The Viking Press, 1950. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good. 8x5x1. First edition, first state. Pink cloth boards. Two quarter-inch chips to jacket spine head, jacket edges rubbed. Ink name on front endpaper. 1950 Hard Cover. viii, 314 pp. Pink cloth boards. Upton Sinclair has taken a bus-man's holiday to write this new novel, his first since he completed his ten volume Lanny Budd series. He has gone back to that first great English bestseller, Richardson's Pamela of 1740, and used it as a model for a novel of our own times. His modern Pamela is a naive country girl, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, who goes to work as parlor maid for a wealthy and eccentric California family. In a series of letters to her mother and sister, she tells the story of her awakening to a bewildering world. Her battles against the seductions of the young master, a playboy of the twenties, provide a series of episodes that are comic, pathetic, and as true to life today as they were two hundred years ago; and they lead to the rewards of virtue just as they did in the eighteenth century. Upton Sinclair is first a master story-teller, and in the unfolding of Pamela's love story, with its pit-falls and frustrations, he keeps us in suspense from page to page. But Upton Sinclair is also a critic of society, even when on a holiday, and he does not lose this opportunity to poke fun at the weaknesses of our system. His Pamela becomes the secretary to the young man's aunt, a millionaire dowager given to good causes who can afford to be a parlor pink. In and out of the great house come Hindu sages, criminal syndicalists, birth-control fanciers, peripatetic poets, Wobblies, movie stars, and cultists of all varieties; Pamela II, in her innocence, holds up the touchstone of her simple heart to assay them. There is fun as well as food for thought in this novel, a departure from anything that even this versatile author has ever offered us before.