Resurrecting rebels left ‘dead on the page’: (auto)biography as adaptation and the lingering legacy of didactic American political fiction in Chris Bachelder’s <i>U.S.!</i>

Abstract Chris Bachelder’s 2006 political satire U.S.! re-examines contemporary American political literature by adapting the author Upton Sinclair as a biographical text. The fictional Sinclair emerges as a deceased man alive via resurrection, a man who continuously fails at political advocacy. Yet, the novel also recognizes his status as a lingering past, a biography in need of adaptation to connect with the concerns of the present day. In this article, I explore the context of the undead Sinclair as a faded biographical narrative, one decaying and rejected primarily because Sinclair and the political literature he represents have been unable to adapt to twenty-first-century concerns; likewise, I argue that Bachelder, despite his concerns for sincere political engagement via contemporary American literature, demonstrates the potential for such engagement through a brief adaptation with an autobiographical frame—a simultaneous engagement with John Dos Passos’s narratives as a fragment within U.S.!’s larger narrative.