How long does it take to read Oil!?
Oil! by Upton Sinclair takes about 9 hours 40 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 40 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1927. 527 pages, about 144,925 words.
20 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 16 hours 6 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 40 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 2 minutes |
The page count is the median across 58 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Sinclair's 1927 novel did for California's oil industry what The Jungle did for Chicago's meat-packing factories. In Oil! Upton Sinclair fashioned a novel out of the oil scandals of the Harding administration, providing in the process a detailed picture of the development of the oil industry in Southern California. Bribery of public officials, class warfare, and international rivalry over oil production are the context for Sinclair's story of a genial independent oil developer and his son, whose sympathy with the oilfield workers and socialist organizers fuels a running debate with his father. Senators, small investors, oil magnates, a Hollywood film star, and a crusading evangelist people the pages of this lively novel.
Subjects: Fiction, Petroleum industry and trade, Petroleum industry and trade in fiction, Southern california in fiction, Motion picture industry, Motion picture industry in fiction
