ABSTRACT
Christine Chapman suggests that the prominent Europeans who signed for Sinclair are moved by a subconscious irritation, "a slight envy," against the United States. "It is not taste; it is temper. A justification for their harsh feelings." As for the function of literature, Miss Chapman summarizes it admirably: "The pleasure it gives is infinite." In Isabel Paterson's column of January 17,1932, she ridiculed the agitation to award socialist writer Upton Sinclair* the Nobel Prize in literature. Creative ability in literature is very frequently, perhaps in the majority of cases, linked with revolutionary sentiment; because the writer must have vitality, curiosity, passion and sympathy, and therefore will be stirred to protest against whatever he considers wrong; and since many things are always wrong, the writer is quite likely to be right.
