A World to Win (Sinclair novel)
novel by Upton Sinclair
A World to Win is the seventh novel in Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. First published in 1946, the story covers the period from 1940 to 1942.
Plot
In Vichy France, maintaining his cover as a dilettante sympathetic to the Nazis, Lanny insinuates himself among French pro-Nazis Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval. Lanny urges Raoul that the French underground should support the capitalist English for now, and return to the class struggle after Hitler is defeated. Back on the Riviera, which is overrun by oblivious vacationers, Beauty wants Lanny to marry the heiress Lizbeth Holdenhurst; she suspects Lanny is in love with Lizbeth's poor cousin, the writer Laurel Creston.
Lanny travels to Spain to gather information on Franco and the Nazis' plans to take Gibraltar. Back in London under the bombing, Lanny updates Rick, who observes that the economic masters in all countries fund criminal thugs to eliminate dissent; Rick says England will fight to the end. Irma and Ceddy say the upper class want an accommodation, leaving Hitler to attack Russia. Rick's son Alfy is flying Spitfire planes defending London; the Budd fighter models have gone out of date, he says, and the outlook is uncertain. Lanny says improved Budd fighter planes will be arriving, if the RAF can hold out.
“A World to Win (Sinclair novel)” enters the record as novel by Upton Sinclair. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what World, Sinclair and novel can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4660827. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1940 and 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “A World to Win (Sinclair novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.