Of "Artistic Freedom"

In Money Writes! Upton Sinclair early on acknowledges the time he spent laying the intellectual groundwork for his survey of American literature as it stood circa 1927, and answered those who would take issue with it the argument that "You cannot understand a plant except you know the soil and climate in which it has grown," with the "soil and climate" here the "political and economic" forces that make literature what it is--in his view, and I think in the view of those who have not been robbed of their judgment by the Cult of High Modernism, an "unwholesome thing" that "is poisoned with pessimism."

Sinclair explained this as a matter of "the great Fascist magazines and publishing houses of America, with their direct Wall Street control . . . determin[ing] American literature and art," and the fact that these "by official decree" had "banished" all "truth-telling and heroism," so that for the writer "there is nothing left but to jeer and die"--or " retire into a garret and starve," this the kind of "freedom" the artist has.

A near-century on there is little to dispute in that--except to acknowledge that old-fashioned garrets may be harder to come by these days, and that self-publishing, entirely in line with the differences between what the cyber-utopians promised and what we actually got, has yet to make a whit of difference regarding the control of the media and of culture.