The Moneychangers

Upton Sinclair won a Pulitzer Prize for his notorious 1906 novel The Jungle, a fictionalized account of the barbaric conditions of the men and women who worked in Chicago's meatpacking industry. And just as the horrific circumstances he exposed in that book more than a century ago appear to be recurring in our fast-food nation, so do those he highlights in his 1908 novel, the cautionary tale The Moneychangers. First published in 1908, this is the story of a small band of Wall Street players who plot to outmaneuver their rivals via financial schemes that sound all too familiar in today's chaotic economic environment: shell companies and creative accounting lure unwitting investors to prop up secretly bankrupt corporations, prompting a stock market crash, a bank run, and a dramatic rise in unemployment. As with The Jungle, this is based on real events-the Wall Street crash of 1907-and reads as startlingly prescient today, as the very crimes Sinclair strove to highlight plague society once again.