Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, into a family that had known better days ^[1]. His father, a liquor salesman struggling with alcoholism, drifted from job to job, while his mother came from a prosperous Baltimore family. The contrast marked the boy deeply: nights in cheap boarding houses with his parents alternated with visits to wealthy relatives, an early education in the gap between American poverty and American comfort ^[2].

The family moved to New York City when Upton was about ten. A precocious reader, he entered the College of the City of New York at fourteen and began paying his own way by selling jokes, puzzles, and stories to magazines and newspapers ^[1]. By his late teens he was churning out dime novels and adventure serials at an astonishing pace, sometimes dictating thousands of words a day to keep himself fed while he pursued graduate study at Columbia University ^[3].

This apprenticeship in commercial hackwork taught Sinclair speed and narrative economy, but he wanted more. Around the turn of the century he committed himself to serious fiction, publishing his first literary novel, Springtime and Harvest, in 1901. It sold poorly, as did the several earnest novels that followed, and Sinclair spent his early twenties in real hardship, living at times in a cabin and struggling to support his young family ^[2].

Sinclair's conversion to socialism, around 1902, gave his writing a direction it had lacked. He joined the Socialist Party of America and began contributing to the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, which had a large national circulation among farmers and workers ^[3]. In 1904 the paper's editors sent him to Chicago to investigate the stockyards, where a bitter strike by packinghouse workers had just been broken. Sinclair spent about seven weeks moving through the plants and the immigrant neighborhoods of Packingtown, taking notes on everything from the killing floors to the boarding houses ^[1].

The result was The Jungle, serialized in Appeal to Reason in 1905 and published in book form by Doubleday, Page in February 1906 after several publishers turned it down ^[4]. The novel follows Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant, through a cascade of disasters in the packing plants, and its passages on diseased meat, rat-infested storage rooms, and adulterated products horrified readers. Sinclair had intended an indictment of wage labor; the public fixed instead on what was in its sausage. He later summed up the misfire with a much-quoted remark that he had aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach ^[1].

The uproar reached the White House. President Theodore Roosevelt, though wary of Sinclair's politics, ordered his own investigation of the packinghouses, and its findings largely confirmed the sanitary charges. Within months Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, both signed on June 30, 1906 ^[5]. At twenty-seven, Sinclair was internationally famous, and The Jungle remains the clearest case in American history of a novel producing federal legislation.

Any account of Upton Sinclair achievements has to begin with The Jungle, but his output hardly paused afterward. Over a career of nearly seventy years he published close to a hundred books: novels, plays, pamphlets, and studies of American institutions ^[2]. His self-published nonfiction of the 1920s took on one power center after another: The Brass Check (1920) attacked the newspaper business and its dependence on advertisers, The Goose-Step (1923) examined universities, and Oil! (1927), a novel drawing on the Southern California petroleum boom and the Teapot Dome era, later served as loose source material for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood ^[6].

Boston (1928), a two-volume documentary novel about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, showed his method at its most ambitious, weaving trial records into fiction while the controversy was still raw ^[3]. Sinclair also experimented beyond print. With money from The Jungle he founded the Helicon Home Colony, a cooperative living experiment in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1906; it burned down within a year ^[2]. In the early 1930s he ventured into cinema, backing the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished Mexican film project, an episode that ended in acrimony but left behind remarkable footage ^[6].

His largest sustained literary project came late. Beginning with World's End in 1940, Sinclair produced eleven novels tracing world events from 1913 onward through the eyes of Lanny Budd, the cosmopolitan son of an American arms manufacturer. The third volume, Dragon's Teeth, which dealt with the rise of Nazi Germany, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 ^[7]. The series sold widely in the United States and abroad, and it gave Sinclair, long dismissed by critics as a pamphleteer, a measure of establishment literary recognition.

Sinclair ran for office repeatedly on the Socialist ticket, contesting congressional and Senate seats in New Jersey and California and the California governorship in 1926 and 1930, never drawing more than a modest protest vote ^[3]. The Depression changed his calculation. In 1933 he registered as a Democrat and announced a program he called End Poverty in California, or EPIC, which proposed putting the unemployed to work in idle factories and on idle farmland, organized into self-supporting cooperatives, along with pension and tax reforms ^[8].

To general astonishment he won the Democratic primary in August 1934 by a wide margin, transforming a fringe crusade into a serious bid for power in the nation's most turbulent large state. The general election campaign against Republican incumbent Frank Merriam became one of the ugliest in American history. Studio bosses, newspaper chains, and advertising firms mounted a coordinated assault, including staged newsreels depicting hoboes swarming into California, an effort historians often cite as a founding moment of modern negative media campaigning ^[8].

Sinclair lost in November 1934, taking roughly 879,000 votes against Merriam's 1.1 million, but EPIC clubs had built a movement that reshaped California's Democratic Party and sent dozens of sympathizers to the legislature ^[8]. Sinclair told the story himself in a wry post-mortem, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), and then largely withdrew from electoral politics to return to writing ^[1].

Sinclair married three times. His first marriage, to Meta Fuller in 1900, produced his only child, David, born in 1901; the marriage frayed under poverty and temperamental differences and ended in divorce in 1912 ^[2]. The following year he married Mary Craig Kimbrough, a writer from a Mississippi family, and the two remained together until her death in 1961. Craig, as she was known, managed much of his business affairs and shielded him from distractions during their long years in Pasadena and later Monrovia, California ^[1]. In 1961, at eighty-three, he married Mary Elizabeth Willis, who died in 1967 ^[2].

His private habits were austere. Sinclair did not drink, a stance shaped by his father's alcoholism, and he pursued fasting regimens and dietary experiments that he described in health books such as The Fasting Cure (1911) ^[3]. He was also, for a period, seriously interested in telepathy, publishing Mental Radio in 1930 about experiments with his second wife, a book that drew a preface from Albert Einstein for its German edition ^[6]. Friends and opponents alike described him as earnest to a fault, tireless, and almost incapable of cynicism.

After completing the Lanny Budd cycle in 1953, Sinclair slowed but never stopped. He published an updated autobiography in 1962 and continued to give interviews defending the causes of his youth ^[1]. Widowed twice in the 1960s, he left California and moved east to be near his son, settling finally in a nursing home in Bound Brook, New Jersey ^[2].

Recognition arrived in his last years from unexpected quarters. In December 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson invited the eighty-nine-year-old author to the White House for the signing of the Wholesome Meat Act, a law extending federal inspection standards, a gesture that closed a circle begun with The Jungle six decades earlier ^[5]. Sinclair died in Bound Brook on November 25, 1968, at the age of ninety, and was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. ^[1].

Sinclair's name became permanently attached to the muckraking tradition, the label Theodore Roosevelt coined, partly in irritation, for the investigative writers of the Progressive Era ^[5]. Among the essential Upton Sinclair facts is this: no other American novelist can point so directly to laws his fiction produced. The 1906 food and drug statutes led in time to the modern Food and Drug Administration, and The Jungle is still assigned in history classrooms as a primary window on immigrant labor and industrial Chicago ^[4].

Literary critics have never ranked him with the great stylists of his generation, and Sinclair himself conceded that he wrote for effect rather than polish. Yet his influence persists in every generation of investigative journalism and social-problem fiction, and lines of his, notably the observation that it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it, from the EPIC campaign memoir, circulate constantly in political argument ^[8]. His papers, an enormous archive of manuscripts and correspondence, are held at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, where scholars continue to mine one of the fullest records any American writer left behind ^[9]. For readers of any Upton Sinclair biography, the durable lesson is how far stubborn documentation, joined to storytelling, can move a country.