biography of upton sinclair

Upton Sinclair

(1878-1968)

Who Was Upton Sinclair?

Upton Sinclair was an American writer whose involvement with socialism led to a writing assignment about the plight of workers in the meatpacking industry, eventually resulting in the best-selling novel The Jungle (1906). Although many of his later works and bids for political office were unsuccessful, Sinclair earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for Dragon's Teeth .

Sinclair was born in a small row house in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878. From birth, he was exposed to dichotomies that would have a profound effect on his young mind and greatly influence his thinking later in life. The only child of an alcoholic liquor salesman and a puritanical, strong-willed mother, he was raised on the edge of poverty but was also exposed to the privileges of the upper class through visits with his mother’s wealthy family.

Upton Sinclair Books

Having completed his schooling at age 20, Sinclair made the decision to become a serious novelist while working as a freelance journalist to make ends meet. In 1900, he also began a family, marrying Meta Fuller, with whom he would have a son, David, the following year.

Though their marriage would ultimately prove to be an unhappy one, it did inspire Sinclair’s first novel, Springtime and Harvest (1901), which, after receiving numerous rejections, Sinclair published himself. Over the next few years, he would write several more novels—based on topics ranging from Wall Street to the Civil War to autobiography—but all were more or less failures.

'The Jungle'

Ultimately, it would be Sinclair’s political convictions that would lead to his first literary success and the one for which he is most known. The contempt he had developed for the upper class as a youth had led Sinclair to socialism in 1903, and in 1904 he was sent to Chicago by the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason to write an exposé on the mistreatment of workers in the meatpacking industry. After spending several weeks conducting undercover research on his subject matter, Sinclair threw himself into the manuscript that would become The Jungle .

Initially rejected by publishers, in 1906 the novel was finally released by Doubleday to great public acclaim—and shock. Despite Sinclair’s intention to reveal the plight of laborers at the meatpacking plants, his vivid descriptions of the cruelty to animals and unsanitary conditions there caused a great public outcry and ultimately changed the way people shopped for food.

Upon its release, Sinclair enlisted his fellow writer and friend Jack London to help publicize his book and assist in getting his message across to the masses. The Jungle became a massive bestseller and was translated into 17 languages within months of its release. Among its readers was President Theodore Roosevelt , who—despite his aversion to Sinclair’s politics—invited Sinclair to the White House and ordered an inspection of the meatpacking industry. As a result, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were both passed in 1906.

From Politics to Pulitzer

Fame and fortune would not derail Sinclair from his political convictions; in fact, they only served to deepen them and enable him to embark on personal projects such as Helicon Hall, a utopian co-op he constructed in New Jersey in 1906 with royalties received from The Jungle . The building burned down less than a year later, and Sinclair was forced to abandon his plans, suspecting that he had been targeted because of his socialist politics.

Sinclair published numerous works over the following decade, including the novels The Metropolis (1908) and King Coal (1917), and the education critique The Goose-Step (1923) . But the author’s persistent focus on ideology often did little to help sales, and most of his fiction during this period was commercially unsuccessful.

By the early 1920s, Sinclair had divorced Meta, remarried a woman named Mary Kimbrough and moved to Southern California, where he continued both his literary and political pursuits. He founded the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and as a candidate for the Socialist Party, he launched unsuccessful bids for Congress. His novels from this period fared far better than his political ventures, with 1927’s Oil! (about the Teapot Dome scandal) and 1928’s Boston (about the Sacco and Vanzetti case) both receiving favorable reviews. Eighty years after it appeared in print, Oil! would be made into the Academy Award-winning film There Will Be Blood.

With the onset of the Great Depression , Sinclair intensified his political activities. He organized the End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement, a public-works program that was the basis for his 1934 run as the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor of California. Despite vehement opposition from the political establishment, both within the Democratic Party and beyond, Sinclair was defeated by a relatively small margin, taking 37 percent of the vote in a three-candidate race. He celebrated his loss by publishing a work titled I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked in 1935 .

In 1940, Sinclair published the historical novel World’s End. It was first of what would be 11 books in the “Lanny Budd” series, named for the protagonist who somehow manages to be present at all of the most significant world events in the early 20th century. The 1942 installment in the series, Dragon’s Teeth , which explores the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Germany, earned Sinclair the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year.

Later Years and Death

Sinclair continued his tireless and prolific output into the second half of the century, but by the early 1960s, he had turned his attention to Mary, who was in poor health following a stroke. She passed away in 1961, and two years later, at age 83, Sinclair married for a third time, to Mary Willis.

Several years later, his own health caused him to move to a nursing home in Bound Brook, New Jersey. He died on November 25, 1968, at the age of 90, having written more than 90 books, 30 plays and countless other works of journalism.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Upton Sinclair
• Birth Year: 1878
• Birth date: September 20, 1878
• Birth State: Maryland
• Birth City: Baltimore
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Upton Sinclair was an activist writer whose works, including 'The Jungle' and 'Boston,' often uncovered social injustices.
• Business and Industry
• Civil Rights
• Fiction and Poetry
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Virgo
• College of the City of New York
• Columbia University
• Death Year: 1968
• Death date: November 25, 1968
• Death State: New Jersey
• Death City: Bound Brook
• Death Country: United States

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• Article Title: Upton Sinclair Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
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• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• [With 'The Jungle'] I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
• All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
• To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat- and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going.

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• World Biography

Upton Sinclair Biography

Born: September 20, 1878 Baltimore, Maryland Died: November 25, 1968 Bound Brook, New Jersey American writer

Upton Sinclair, American novelist and political writer, was one of the most important muckrakers (writers who search out and reveal improper conduct in politics and business) of the 1900s. His novel The Jungle helped improve working conditions in the meat-packing industry.

Early life and education

Upton Beale Sinclair Jr. was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878. He was the only child of Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden. His father worked at different times selling liquor, hats, and men's clothes. He also struggled with poverty and a drinking problem. Young Upton was a shy, thoughtful boy who taught himself to read at age five. The family moved to New York City when Upton was ten, and at fourteen he entered New York City College. He graduated in 1897 and went to Columbia University to study law, but instead became more interested in politics and literature. He never earned a law degree. Through these years he supported himself by writing for adventure-story magazines. While attending Columbia he wrote eight thousand words a day. He also continued to read a great deal—over one two-week Christmas break he read all of William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) works as well as all of John Milton's (1608–1674) poetry.

Becomes involved in politics

Sinclair moved to Quebec, Canada, in 1900. That same year he married Meta Fuller, with whom he had a son. His first novel, Springtime and Harvest (1901), was a modest success. Three more novels in the next four years failed to provide even a bare living. Sinclair became a member of the Socialist Party in 1902, and he was a Socialist candidate for Congress from New Jersey in 1906. (Socialists believe in a system in which there is no private property and all people own the means of production, such as factories and farms, as a group.)

Also in 1906 Sinclair's The Jungle, a novel exposing unfair labor practices and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing factories of Chicago, Illinois, was a huge success. Sinclair had spent seven weeks observing the operations of a meat-packing plant before writing the book. The Jungle 's protest about the problems of laborers and the socialist solutions it proposed caused a public outcry. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) invited Sinclair to discuss packing-house conditions, and a congressional investigation led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Documents personal life

Sinclair divorced his first wife in 1913. The autobiographical (based on his own life) novel Love's Pilgrimage (1911) treats his marriage and the birth of his child with an honesty that shocked some reviewers. Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough in 1913. Sylvia and Sylvia's Marriage, a massive two-part story, called for sexual enlightenment (freedom from ignorance and misinformation).

King Coal (1917), based on a coal strike of 1914 and 1915, returned to labor protest and socialistic comment. However, in 1917 Sinclair left the Socialist Party to support President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924). He returned to the socialist camp when Wilson supported intervention in the Soviet Union. In California Sinclair ran on the Socialist ticket for Congress (1920), for the Senate (1922), and for governor (1926 and 1930).

Continues stirring things up

Sinclair continued his writings on political and reform issues. Oil! (1927) dealt with dishonesty in President Warren G. Harding's (1865–1923) administration. Boston (1928), a novel about the Sacco-Vanzetti case (in which two Italian men, believed by many to have been innocent, were convicted and executed for having committed a murder during a payroll robbery), brought to light much new material and demonstrated the constructive research that always lay beneath Sinclair's protest writings.

In 1933 Sinclair was persuaded to campaign seriously for governor of California. He called his program "End Poverty in California." His sensible presentation of Socialist ideas won him the Democratic nomination, but millions of dollars and a campaign based on lies and fear defeated him in the election.

World's End (1940) launched Sinclair's eleven-volume novel series that attempted to give an insider's view of the U.S. government between 1913 and 1949. One of the novels, Dragon's Teeth (1942), a study of the rise of Nazism (a German political movement of the 1930s whose followers scorned democracy and favored the destruction of all "inferior" non-Germans, especially Jewish people), won the Pulitzer Prize. Before his death on November 25, 1968, Sinclair had produced more than ninety books that earned at least $1 million, most of it contributed to socialist and reform causes.

For More Information

Harris, Leon A. Upton Sinclair, American Rebel. New York: Crowell, 1975.

Scott, Ivan. Upton Sinclair: The Forgotten Socialist. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996.

Sinclair, Upton. Autobiography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1962.

Sinclair, Upton. My Lifetime in Letters. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1960.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Upton Sinclair

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Upton Sinclair by Nicolas S. Witschi LAST REVIEWED: 21 January 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 21 January 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0025

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr., (b. 1878–d. 1968) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a family of meager means that still had historical ties to Southern gentility. Driven by a fervent idealism, Sinclair nurtured his childhood encounters with both hardship and refinement into a compulsion to make the world a better place through literature. He undertook the researching and writing of his best-known book, The Jungle , at the urging of an editor for the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason who had read Manassas , Sinclair’s attempt to dramatize the moral consequences of slavery. An instant bestseller on a truly global scale, The Jungle offered a harrowing condemnation of the meat industry’s treatment of its workers. It made Sinclair’s reputation, and it had an almost immediate political effect. President Theodore Roosevelt used its popularity to push through passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, a dramatic food safety reform law, even as he derisively lumped its author with the journalist “muckrakers” he generally detested. Sinclair’s subsequent works did not have the same impact as The Jungle , though he would never tire of railing against the inequities that structured American life. Indeed, the usually affable Sinclair became a serious thorn in the sides of the coal and petroleum industries, Hollywood, organized religion, the auto industry, and the realms of finance and journalism, among many others. On several occasions he sought the governorship of his adopted home state of California, and his surprise winning of the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1934 race radically changed the party, invigorating it out of its early New Deal indolence. Moreover, the mass media machine that the Republican Party and its allies in Hollywood marshaled to discredit and defeat him greatly changed how film and eventually television would factor in electoral politics. Dismissed as a writer who seemed to prefer content over form, Sinclair was nevertheless a vital influence on the culture of his day. In his preface to Boston , his 1928 novel about the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, Sinclair wrote of trying to craft a “contemporary historical novel.” In many respects, this phrase describes his strength as a literary artist, for it identifies a form evident in everything from The Jungle and Oil! to the immensely popular Lanny Budd series of his later years. Many readers know Upton Sinclair for his food industry exposé; much of the remaining canon of roughly ninety books and scores of pamphlets, essays, and manifestos certainly merits closer attention as well.

These books and book chapters offer brief glimpses into a far-from-brief career. Typically they look at a select few novels and seek to establish Sinclair’s significance within literary history, particularly as it relates to social reform movements. Beginning with Dell 1969 , which was first published during Sinclair’s life, a number of useful books have attempted to provide generally contextualizing and interpretive lenses on the career as a whole. Bloodworth 1977 is still quite useful for its career-based approach and fair assessments of literary merit, while Yoder 1975 is still one of the more reliable assessments of Sinclair’s development as a socialist thinker and writer, though Van Wienen 2012 (cited under Contexts ) should also be consulted. Whittemore 1993 further analyzes Sinclair’s idealism and iconoclasm, focusing primarily on his early career and his connections to several other compelling literary artists of his day. Grenier 1983 offers an engaging discussion of Sinclair in the context of Progressive-era journalistic attempts to effect change at the political level. Kongshaug 2000 frames Sinclair’s aesthetic efforts as attempts to connect his idealistic uses of history with writerly approaches that would be more appealing to a wide audience than straightforward historical narrative might be.

Bloodworth, William A. Upton Sinclair . Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Traces Sinclair’s writings in the context of his biography, from early youthful works through his last writings in the 1960s. Limns Sinclair as a writer deeply engaged with the political effects of his work. Also useful for analyzing how Sinclair’s idealism often clashed with prevailing social forces during his lifetime.

Dell, Floyd. Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest . New York: Folcroft, 1969.

Written by a friend of Sinclair’s at his behest and first published in 1927, this mini-biography was intended as an account of Sinclair’s international fame and a response to requests for biographical information. While the volume laid out Sinclair’s life and ideas for readers of the day, it remains useful for today’s readers.

Grenier, Judson A. “Muckraking the Muckrakers: Upton Sinclair and His Peers.” In Reform and Reformers in the Progressive Era . Edited by David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta, 71–92. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983.

A mix of personal reminiscence, interviews with Sinclair, and historical scholarship. Places Sinclair within the context of fellow Progressive writers. Mostly emphasizes the journalistic qualities and contexts of his work.

Kongshaug, Erik. “Upton Sinclair.” In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies: Supplement V. Russell Banks to Charles Wright . Edited by Jay Parini, 275–293. New York: Scribner, 2000.

A succinct and useful account of a literary life, with specific attention to Sinclair’s attempts to use self-publication, aggressive self-promotion, and activist pamphleteering to bring his art to a mass audience.

Whittemore, Reed. Six Literary Lives: The Shared Impiety of Adams, London, Sinclair, Williams, Dos Passos, and Tate . Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Depicts Sinclair as representative of a group of American writers who defined the contradictions of the twentieth century. Focuses on Sinclair’s early career, making frequent connections to his friend and colleague Jack London.

Yoder, Jon A. Upton Sinclair . New York: Ungar, 1975.

Traces Sinclair’s socialism through the representative texts of his career, seeking to establish the grounds upon which he may be recognized as more than a hack who “wrote widely without writing anything worth remembering” (p. 4).

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Biography: upton sinclair.

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books and other works across a number of genres. Sinclair’s work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckrakingnovel, The Jungle , which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Actand the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check , a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check , the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him “a man with every gift except humor and silence.” He is remembered for writing the famous line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Sinclair was an outspoken socialist and ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a nominee from the Socialist Party. He was also the Democratic Party candidate for Governor of California during the Great Depression, but was defeated in the 1934 elections.

His novel based on the meatpacking industry in Chicago, The Jungle, was first published in serial form in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, from February 25, 1905 to November 4, 1905. It was published as a book by Doubleday in 1906.

Sinclair had spent about six months investigating the Chicago meatpacking industry for Appeal to Reason , work which inspired his novel. He intended to “set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit.” The novel featured Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who works in a meat factory in Chicago, his teenage wife Ona Lukoszaite, and their extended family. Sinclair portrays their mistreatment by Rudkus’ employers and the wealthier elements of society. His descriptions of the unsanitary and inhumane conditions that workers suffered served to shock and galvanize readers. Jack London called Sinclair’s book “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.” Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half.

Sinclair wrote in Cosmopolitan Magazine in October 1906 about The Jungle : “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”The novel brought public lobbying for Congressional legislation and government regulation of the industry, including passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. At the time, President Theodore Roosevelt characterized Sinclair as a “crackpot”,   writing to William Allen White, “I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.” After reading The Jungle, Roosevelt agreed with some of Sinclair’s conclusions but was opposed to legislation that he considered “socialist.” He said, “Radical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist.”

View Upton Sinclair’s full biography on Wikipedia .

• Upton Sinclair. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
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Upton Sinclair

In 1933, Nazi students at more than 30 German universities pillaged libraries in search of books they considered to be "un-German." Among the literary and political writings they threw into the flames were the works of Upton Sinclair. 

• book burning

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Political sovereignty has been taken out of the possession of private individuals and made the property of the whole community, to be shared in by all on equal terms; but industrial sovereignty is still the property of a few. A man can no longer be put in jail or taxed by a king, but he can be starved and exploited by a master; his body is now his own, but his labor is another's. — The Industrial Republic , Upton Sinclair, 1907

Which of Upton Sinclair's Works were Burned?

The Brass Check (Der Sündenlohn) 100%: The Story of a Patriot Boston: A Documentary Novel of the Sacco-Vanzetti Trial Jimmie Higgins: A Story The Jungle (Der Sumpf) Oil (Petroleum) The Profits of Religion; An Essay in Economic Interpretation (Religion und Profit) Mammonart (Die goldene Kette)

Who was Upton Sinclair?

American author Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) is best known for his popular 1906 work The Jungle , a depiction of the corruption, filth, and cruelty he witnessed while undercover in the Chicago meatpacking industry. In this and other "muckraking" works including The Brass Check and King Coal , Sinclair exposed social injustice and economic exploitation. He advocated reform in American society.

In later years, Upton Sinclair would relinquish his socialist views and support the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt ; but his prominence as a socialist writer in the 1930s induced the Nazis to include his works in their book burnings .

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3.6: Biography: Upton Sinclair

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Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books and other works across a number of genres. Sinclair’s work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckrakingnovel, The Jungle , which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Actand the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check , a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check , the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him “a man with every gift except humor and silence.” He is remembered for writing the famous line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Sinclair was an outspoken socialist and ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a nominee from the Socialist Party. He was also the Democratic Party candidate for Governor of California during the Great Depression, but was defeated in the 1934 elections.

His novel based on the meatpacking industry in Chicago, The Jungle, was first published in serial form in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, from February 25, 1905 to November 4, 1905. It was published as a book by Doubleday in 1906.

Sinclair had spent about six months investigating the Chicago meatpacking industry for Appeal to Reason , work which inspired his novel. He intended to “set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit.” The novel featured Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who works in a meat factory in Chicago, his teenage wife Ona Lukoszaite, and their extended family. Sinclair portrays their mistreatment by Rudkus’ employers and the wealthier elements of society. His descriptions of the unsanitary and inhumane conditions that workers suffered served to shock and galvanize readers. Jack London called Sinclair’s book “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.” Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half.

Sinclair wrote in Cosmopolitan Magazine in October 1906 about The Jungle : “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”The novel brought public lobbying for Congressional legislation and government regulation of the industry, including passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. At the time, President Theodore Roosevelt characterized Sinclair as a “crackpot”,   writing to William Allen White, “I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.” After reading The Jungle, Roosevelt agreed with some of Sinclair’s conclusions but was opposed to legislation that he considered “socialist.” He said, “Radical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist.”

View Upton Sinclair’s full biography on Wikipedia .

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Upton Sinclair, American Original

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Biography and Autobiography

November 24, 2014 by magscanner

Upton Sinclair wrote more than eighty books, and among them were a couple of autobiographical works. In addition, he was profiled in such volumes as American Outpost , and did occasional self-explanatory pieces for major and minor newspapers and periodicals. We presume he was paid for the work.

A couple of our external links are of that nature.

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Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (Sept. 20, 1878 – Nov. 25, 1968) was a writer of novels of social protest and political tracts; he is best known for his 1906 expose of the meatpacking industry, "The Jungle."

Born in Baltimore, Md., Sinclair was named for his father, an amiable alcoholic who became a symbol for feckless failure in the eyes of his son. Sinclair's mother, Priscilla Harden, was by contrast Puritanical and strong-willed, qualities that Sinclair also embodied. Living in cheap apartments in New York from the age of 10, Sinclair had personal experience of poverty. But he was also an indulged only child who often visited his mother's wealthy relatives in Maryland. The contrast between wealth and poverty troubled him and became his major theme.

Sinclair was one of the best educated American writers of his era, graduating from what is now City University of New York at 18 and attending classes at Columbia College for two more years, but he condemned American education for failing to explain and rectify social problems associated with poverty. Hungry as a young shark, in his words, for money and fame, he began writing boys' stories at 16. At 20 he vowed to give up hack writing and become a serious novelist.

At 21 he married the 18-year-old Meta Fuller. Their son, David, was born the following year, in December 1901. Sinclair's several serious novels failed, and his marriage was in trouble when, in 1903, he turned to what he regarded as the secular religion of Socialism. In 1904 his Socialist contacts sent him to Chicago to write about the plight of meatpacking workers. The resulting novel, "The Jungle," aroused such great indignation — about bad meat, not about mistreated workers, as Sinclair had intended — that it helped secure passage of the country's first Pure Food and Drug laws.

Sinclair used his sudden wealth and fame to support several experiments in communitarian living. He also agitated for various reforms, all detailed in hastily written novels and nonfiction books and articles that did not live up to the promise of "The Jungle." His marriage collapsed in 1911, and in 1913 he married again, more happily, to Mary Craig Kimbrough. In 1916 they moved to Pasadena, Calif. In the productive 12 years that followed, Sinclair wrote nonfiction critiques of American education, religion, journalism, and literature. He also wrote more fiction, including the well-received "Oil!" in 1927 and "Boston," about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in 1928 (the film based on "Oil!," "There Will Be Blood," effectively captures the best part of the novel, the bringing in of the well).

In 1934 Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat; he lost, but was said to have altered the state's rigid conservatism. Returning to writing, Sinclair reinvented himself as a historical novelist. "World's End," in 1940, would be the first of 11 "Lanny Budd" novels, in which Sinclair's young protagonist roams the world, meeting leaders both good (Roosevelt, Churchill) and evil (Hitler, Mussolini). By 1953, when the series ended, Sinclair had become a committed cold warrior, convinced that the Soviet Union for which he had once had high hopes was a tyranny worse than Hitler's.

A few more books would follow, but Sinclair spent most of his time caring for his ailing wife until her death in 1961. He married for the third time the following year to a lively widow who made the intensely private writer "put the 'social' in Socialism." He also reconciled with his son, David, from whom he had long been estranged; in 1967, the year before his death, he moved to a nursing home in Bound Brook, N.J., not far from his son's home.

Sinclair's vast collection of letters and books is housed in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. It includes a famous photograph of the author, who was about 5 feet 7 inches, standing next to a stack of books he had written that is taller than he is: some 90 books in 90 years. Many of those works were admitted propaganda by a talented writer who had more interest in persuasion and politics than in human personality and are no longer read. One wag said he sold his birthright for a pot of message. But a few, including "The Jungle," parts of "Oil!," and "World's End," hold up well. Sinclair himself was that rarity in the literary world, a man of action as well as of ideas.

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Upton Sinclair

Author : 1878 - 1968, “[w]as one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to whom these hog-squeals and agonies had a meaning who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him , reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice”.

Sinclair wrote over 80 books.

His 1927 book,  Oil! , was the basis for the 2007 feature film,  There Will be Blood .

In 1934, he ran for governor of California.

In 1943, he was awared the Pulitzer Prize, his only major literary award.

In 1967, when he was 89, President Lyndon Johnson invited Sinclair to the White House for the signing of the Wholesome Meat Act.

Upton Sinclair both disrupted and documented his era. The impact of his most famous work,  The Jungle , would merit him a place in American history had he never written another book. Yet he wrote nearly eighty more, publishing most of them himself. What Sinclair did was both simple and profound: he committed his life to helping people of his era understand how society was run, by whom and for whom. His aim was nothing less than to “bury capitalism under a barrage of facts,” as  Howard Zinn  described it. One fact he tried repeatedly to teach was that capitalism and democracy are incompatible: “One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.”

When Upton Sinclair introduced himself to American readers in 1906 with the publication of  The Jungle , his exposé of the meatpacking industry, he was only twenty-five years old. His intent was to awaken the public conscience over the horrendous conditions slaughterhouse workers were forced to endure. Sinclair was appalled that the public reaction to his book was to demand higher health standards for the meat products but ignore the workers. He said, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

For the next six decades, he would remain an unconventional, often controversial, and always innovative character in American life. He was also a filmmaker, a labor activist, a women’s rights advocate, and a health pioneer on the grandest scale.

At the beginning of the 20th century, investigative journalism was just being conceived, and Sinclair’s undercover reporting on the conditions in a meatpacking plant may have been its birthing moment.  He was one of the original muckrakers. Filmmaking was beginning to change the way stories were told and how people gained access to information. His friends were experimenting with sexual freedom and birth control, but the shadow of alcoholism was beginning to take its toll in the radical community, and Sinclair would record his own assessment of the dangers of alcohol in his novel — and later film —  The Wet Parade .

Sinclair critiqued institutions ranging from organized religion to journalism to education. These analyses remain surprisingly relevant. The problems with education and with media concentration, which Sinclair identified so presciently in 1920, have become impossible to ignore nearly one hundred years later.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, organized labor was struggling with the question of how to cope with the emergent hegemony of large-scale corporate capitalism. He had written many articles from Colorado about the coal miners’ strikes, the labor conditions and the Ludlow Massacre (1914), but the corporate friendly newspapers had refused to publish them. Sinclair responded by organizing a daily picket of Rockefeller headquarters in New York City to show support for embattled coal miners in Colorado.

That same year he wrote a science fiction novel,  The Millennium , which predicted what life would be like in 2013 with startling accuracy. Sinclair demonstrated not only how a writer attempts to change history through literature but also lends his or her personality to the political struggles of the times. A conscious creator of popular history, Sinclair himself starred in one of the first pro-labor films every made,  The Jungle , in 1914. He wrote  Boston  to document the Sacco-Vanzetti trial;  Oil!  exposed the depredations of the oil industry in California;  Singing Jailbirds  in 1924 recorded the imprisonment of Wobblies, members of the International Workers of the World union, in Los Angeles.

In his sixties, Sinclair wrote a series of antifascist spy novels, the World’s End series. The series was, as Dieter Herms has noted, “antifascist propaganda entertainingly packaged in the wrappers of popular literature.” The books garnered him best-seller status again, and in 1942 he became the oldest author to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

For Sinclair, his books were significant only to the degree that they exerted social influence, as the concluding pages of his autobiography reveal. He asks himself, “Just what do you think you have accomplished in your long lifetime?” and then provides ten answers. All involve social change in which his books were instrumental. Nowhere in this list of accomplishments is there a judgment that any of his novels represent an exclusively literary achievement. He often reflected, though, on why even the victims of unjust conditions were reluctant to demand change: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Part of Sinclair’s political analysis was that a healthy and sober personal life would make him a more effective agent of change — an early understanding of what would become a radical injunction that the personal is political. Sinclair, writes critic William Bloodworth, made “an unusually vigorous attempt to combine questions of food with political propaganda.”  His mother’s temperance beliefs and his father’s alcoholism made him a lifelong crusader both for Prohibition and for temperance.

Indeed, Upton Sinclair was a man who challenged conventional masculinity. In that sense, he was ahead of his own time and vitally relevant to ours. He was a radical much influenced by women. His interest in communal living and communal childcare is quite unusual. His reading of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s theories on domestic labor and public life inspired his founding of the utopian colony Helicon Hall in 1906, created to allow both men and women full lives as artists and activists.

Upton Sinclair’s activism spanned half a century, and he wrote book after book in an effort to draw others to his causes. As his son, David, recalled, “My father used to say, I don’t know if anyone will care to examine my heart after I die. But if they do, they will find two words there: social justice.” Because Sinclair was so passionately engaged in the world around him, his story is inextricably linked to the major struggles that gave his life meaning.

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The Jungle (Annotated): Original 1906 Edition with Updated Biography of Upton Sinclair Paperback – June 19, 2023

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• A detailed biography of author Upton Sinclair
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About the author

Upton sinclair.

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books and other works across a number of genres. Sinclair's work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle, which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." He is remembered for writing the famous line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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41st Annual Upton Sinclair Celebration

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The Liberty Hill Community came out in full force at our 41st Annual Upton Sinclair Celebration to celebrate frontline organizers, community leaders, and donor activists who contribute to the progressive victories that power social change in Los Angeles.

It was a night full of community and celebration as nearly 600 guests gathered at the beautiful Skirball Cultural Center. The night had it all! From our immersive exhibits highlighting LA’s organizing movements to original artwork from our partners at Spirit Awakening Foundation to our Justice For All lenticular wall which came to life as guests walked past it, this year’s 41st Annual Upton Sinclair Celebration was an event to remember.

The program featured outstanding performances from the powerful musical ensemble— Los Angeles Community Action Network’s The Freedom Singers , featuring an opening set that brought the house down!

This year’s honorees were an exceptional group—including donor activist and community leader Celia Bernstein , who received our Founders Award, Derek Steele , the Executive Director of Social Justice Learning Institute, who received our Wally Marks Changemaker Award for his leadership, as well as Grammy nominated singer-songwriter and social justice activist Aloe Blacc , recipient of our Creative Vision Award, and long-standing community activist and Los Angeles City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez , this year’s Upton Sinclair Award Honoree and keynote speaker.

We are so grateful to everyone who came out in support of our 41st Annual Upton Sinclair Celebration. Together, through your continued support and dedication, we are making change a reality in L.A.

Check out our full event  photo album today!

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