Characters
- James Arnold Ross (aka Dad): is a self-made oil millionaire.
- James Arnold "Bunny" Ross, Jr.: the protagonist, is the only son of a self-made oil millionaire.
- Paul Watkins: a farmer's son who runs away from home, is tutored by a free thinker, and becomes an advocate for the rights of laborers. After spending time in Siberia after World War I, he sympathizes with Bolshevism and becomes a Communist.
- Vernon Roscoe: Dad's business partner, and arguably the novel's antagonist. He is a greedy business man who helps bribe the government to acquire the land in Teapot Dome to drill oil. He also works to crush the unions that oppose him by bribing the authorities to throw its members into jail.
- Alberta "Bertie" Ross: Bunny's older sister. An aspiring socialite.
- Aunt Emma: Bunny's aunt, widow of J. Arnold Ross' brother. She lives with the family.
- Ruth Watkins: Paul's young sister, who is Bunny's age.
- Eli Watkins: Paul's brother, who becomes an evangelical preacher.
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Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life—the first twenty years of it—had about them something semi-fictitious.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“Thus we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“The major men
That is different. They are characters beyond
Reality, composed thereof. They are
The fictive man created out of men.
They are men but artificial men.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)