Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair
Born	Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (1878-09-20)September 20, 1878 Baltimore, Maryland
Died	November 25, 1968(1968-11-25) (aged 90) Bound Brook, New Jersey
Occupation	Novelist, writer, journalist, political activist
Nationality	American
Spouse(s)	Meta Fuller (1902–11) Mary Craig Kimbrough, (1913–61) Mary Elizabeth Willis (1961–67)
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Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). It 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.^[2] 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 the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.^[3] Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence."^[4] In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated rather soundly.

Early life and education

Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism shadowed his son's childhood. Priscilla Harden Sinclair was a strict Episcopalian who disliked alcohol, tea, and coffee. Sinclair did not get along with her when he became older because of her strict rules and refusal to allow him independence. Sinclair told his son David that around his sixteenth year he decided not to have anything to do with her and stayed away from her for 35 years because a controversy would start if they met.^[5] Her lineage was of great affluence. Her parents were very prosperous in Baltimore and her sister married a millionaire. Sinclair had wealthy grandparents with whom he often stayed. This gave him insight into how both the rich and the poor lived during the late nineteenth century. Living in two social settings affected him and greatly influenced his books. Upton Beall Sinclair Sr. was also from a highly respected family in the south, but due to the Civil War and Reconstruction, the family's wealth evaporated and the family became ruined.

Growing up, Upton Sinclair's family would move around continuously due to the fact that Sinclair Sr. wasn't successful. Sinclair Jr. developed a love for reading at an early age of five years old. He read every book that his mother owned for a deeper understanding of the world. In 1888, the Sinclair family moved to Queens, New York, where his father sold shoes and where Sinclair entered the City College of New York, five days before his fourteenth birthday.^[6] He wrote jokes, dime novels and magazine articles in boy's weekly and pulp magazines to pay for his tuition.^[7]

He graduated in 1897 and then studied for a time at Columbia University.^[8] His major was Law, but he was more interested in writing, and he learned several languages including Spanish, German and French. He supported himself through college by writing boys' adventure stories and jokes. Using stenographers, he wrote up to 8,000 words of pulp fiction per day. After leaving Columbia, he wrote four commercially unsuccessful, though critically well-received books, King Midas (1901), Prince Hagen (1902), The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903) and a Civil War novel entitled Manassas (1904).

Career

In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks in disguise, working undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants to research his political fiction exposé, The Jungle. When it was published two years later, it became a bestseller. With the income from The Jungle, Sinclair founded the utopian Helicon Home Colony in Englewood, New Jersey. He ran as a Socialist candidate for Congress.^[9][10] The colony burned down under suspicious circumstances within a year.^[11]

During his years with his second wife, Mary Craig, Sinclair wrote or produced several films. Recruited by Charlie Chaplin, Sinclair and Mary Craig produced Eisenstein's ¡Qué viva México! in 1930–32.^[12]

The Sinclairs moved to California in the 1920s and lived there for nearly four decades. Late in life Sinclair, with his third wife, moved to Buckeye, Arizona, and then to Bound Brook, New Jersey. Sinclair died there in a nursing home on November 25, 1968.^[13] He is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., next to his third wife, Mary Willis, who had died a year before him.

Aside from his political and social writings, Sinclair took an interest in occult phenomena and experimented with telepathy. His book entitled Mental Radio was published in 1930 and included accounts of his wife Mary's telepathic experiences and ability.^[14][15] William McDougall read the book and wrote an introduction to it. It led him to establish the parapsychology department at Duke University.

The Upton Sinclair House in Monrovia, California, is now a National Historic Landmark.^[16] The papers, photographs, and first editions of most of Sinclair's books are found at the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington.^[17]

Political career

In the 1920s the Sinclairs moved to Monrovia, California, near Los Angeles, where Sinclair founded the state's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Wanting to pursue politics, he twice ran unsuccessfully for United States Congress on the Socialist ticket: in 1920 for the House of Representatives and in 1922 for the Senate. During this period, Sinclair was also active in radical politics in Los Angeles. For instance, in 1923, to support the challenged free speech rights of Industrial Workers of the World, Sinclair spoke at a rally in San Pedro, California, in a neighborhood now known as Liberty Hill. He began to read from the Bill of Rights and was promptly arrested, along with hundreds of others, by the LAPD. The arresting officer proclaimed that "we'll have none of that Constitution stuff."^[18]

In 1934, Sinclair ran in the California gubernatorial election as a Democrat. Gaining 879,000 votes made this his most successful run for office, but Frank F. Merriam defeated him by a sizable margin,^[19] gaining 1,138,000 votes.^[20] Sinclair's platform, known as the End Poverty in California movement (EPIC), galvanized the support of the Democratic Party, and Sinclair gained its nomination.^[21]

Sinclair's plan to end poverty quickly became a controversial issue under the pressure of so many migrants to California because of the Dust bowl. Conservatives considered his proposal an attempted communist takeover of their state and quickly opposed him, using propaganda to portray Sinclair as a staunch communist. Sinclair had been a member of the Socialist Party from 1902 to 1934, when he became a Democrat, though always considering himself a Socialist in spirit.^[22] At the same time, American and Soviet communists disassociated themselves from him, considering him a capitalist.^[23] Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein was deeply involved in Sinclair's campaign, although he attempted to move away from the stance later in his life.^[24]

After his loss to Merriam, Sinclair abandoned EPIC and politics to return to writing. In 1935 he published I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, in which he described the techniques employed by Merriam's supporters, including the then popular Aimee Semple McPherson, who vehemently opposed socialism and what she perceived as Sinclair's modernism.

Of his gubernatorial bid, Sinclair remarked in 1951:

The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to 'End Poverty in California' I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them.^[25]

Marriages and family

In 1902, Sinclair married Meta Fuller, who had been a childhood friend and whose family was one of the First Families of Virginia. The couple had a child named David, born on December 1, 1901.^[26] Around 1911, Meta left Sinclair for the poet Harry Kemp, later known as the Dunes Poet of Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In 1913, Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough (1883–1961), a woman from an elite Greenwood, Mississippi, family who had written articles and a book on Winnie Davis, the daughter of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis. He met her when she attended a lecture by him about The Jungle.^[27] In the 1920s, they moved to California. They were married until her death in 1961.

After Craig's death in 1961, Sinclair married Mary Elizabeth Willis (1882–1967).

Sinclair was opposed to sex outside of marriage and he viewed marital relations as only necessary for procreation.^[28] He told his first wife Meta that only the birth of a child gave marriage "dignity and meaning".^[29] Despite his beliefs, he had an adulterous affair with Anna Noyes during his marriage to Meta, writing an unpublished novel about the affair called Love's Progress, a sequel to Love's Pilgrimage.^[30] His wife then had an affair with John Armistead Collier, a theology student from Memphis in which they had a child named Ben.^[31]

Writing

Sinclair devoted his writing career to documenting and criticizing the social and economic conditions of the early twentieth century in both fiction and non-fiction. He exposed his view of the injustices of capitalism and the overwhelming impact of the poverty. He also edited collections of fiction and non-fiction.

The Jungle

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.^[32]

Sinclair had spent about six months investigating the Chicago meatpacking industry for Appeal to Reason, work which inspired his novel. Sinclair intended to "set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit".^[33] 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".^[34] Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half.^[35]

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."^[4] The novel brought public support for Congressional legislation and government regulation of the industry, including passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.^[36] ^ ^[37] At the time, President Theodore Roosevelt characterized Sinclair as a "crackpot",^[38] 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."^[39] After reading The Jungle, Roosevelt agreed with some of Sinclair's conclusions but was opposed to legislation that he considered "socialist." He said, "[R]adical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist."^[40]

The Brass Check

In The Brass Check, Sinclair made a systematic and incriminating critique of the severe limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Among the topics covered is the use of yellow journalism techniques created by William Randolph Hearst. Sinclair called The Brass Check "the most important and most dangerous book I have ever written."^[41]

Sylvia novels

• Sylvia (1913) was a novel about a Southern girl. In her autobiography, Mary Craig Sinclair said she had written the book based on her own experiences as a girl, and Upton collaborated with her.^{[lower-alpha 1]} She asked him to publish it under his name.^[42] When it appeared in 1913, the New York Times called it "the best novel Mr. Sinclair has yet written–so much the best that it stands in a class by itself."^[43]

• Sylvia's Marriage (1914), Craig and Sinclair collaborated on a sequel, also published by John C. Winston Company under only Sinclair's name.^[44] In his 1962 autobiography, Upton Sinclair wrote: "[Mary] Craig had written some tales of her Southern girlhood; and I had stolen them from her for a novel to be called Sylvia."^[45]

The Lanny Budd series

Between 1940 and 1953, Sinclair wrote a series of 11 novels featuring a central character named Lanny Budd. The son of an American arms manufacturer, Budd is portrayed as holding in the confidence of world leaders, and not simply witnessing events but often propelling them. As a sophisticated socialite, who mingles easily with people from all cultures and socioeconomic classes, Budd has been characterized as the antithesis of the stereotyped "Ugly American".^[46]

Sinclair placed Budd within the important political events in the United States and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Today out of print and nearly forgotten, the novels were bestsellers upon publication and were published in translation, appearing in twenty-one countries. The third book in the series, Dragon's Teeth (1942), won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1943.^[47]

The Lanny Budd series includes:

Other works

Sinclair was keenly interested in health and nutrition. He experimented with various diets, and with fasting. He wrote about this in his book, The Fasting Cure (1911), another bestseller.^[48] He believed that periodic fasting was important for health, saying, "I had taken several fasts of ten or twelve days' duration, with the result of a complete making over of my health".^[49]

Sinclair favored a raw food diet of predominantly vegetables and nuts. For long periods of time, he was a complete vegetarian, but he also experimented with eating meat. His attitude to these matters was fully explained in the chapter “The Use of Meat” in the above mentioned book.^[50]

Later references to Sinclair

Sinclair is extensively featured in Harry Turtledove's American Empire trilogy, an alternate history in which the American Socialist Party succeeds in becoming a major force in U.S. politics following two humiliating military defeats to the Confederate States and the post-1882 collapse of the Republican Party, with Abraham Lincoln leading a large number of Republicans into the Socialist Party. He wins the 1920 and 1924 presidential elections and becomes the first Socialist President of the United States, his inauguration attended by crowds of jubilant militants waving red flags. However, the actual policies which Turtledove attributes to him, once in power, are not particularly radical.^{[citation needed]}

Sinclair is featured as one of the main characters in Chris Bachelder's satirical fictional book, U.S.!: a Novel. Repeatedly, Sinclair is resurrected as a personification of the contemporary failings of the American left and portrayed as a quixotic reformer attempting to stir an apathetic American public to implement socialism in America.^[51]

Upton Sinclair and his EPIC plan are referred to by Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here.

Upton Sinclair and his wife Meta are referred to by Joyce Carol Oates in her 2013 novel, The Accursed.

Films

• The Jungle (1906) was adapted for film in 1914, with George Nash playing Jurgis Rudkus and Gail Kane playing Ona Lukozsaite.^[52] Sinclair appears at the beginning and end of the film "as a form of endorsement."^[53]
• The Wet Parade (1931) was adapted as a film of the same name, directed by Victor Fleming and released in 1932. It starred Robert Young, Myrna Loy, Walter Huston, and Jimmy Durante.
• The Gnomobile (1937) was adapted by the Disney organization as a musical motion picture, The Gnome-Mobile (1967).^[54]
• Oil! (1927) was adapted as the film There Will Be Blood (2007), starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano. It was written, produced, and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film received eight Oscar nominations and won two.^[55]

Works

Fiction Courtmartialed - 1898 Saved By the Enemy - 1898 The Fighting Squadron - 1898 A Prisoner of Morro - 1898 A Soldier Monk - 1898 A Gauntlet of Fire - 1899 Holding the Fort (story) - 1899 A Soldier's Pledge - 1899 Wolves of the Navy - 1899 Springtime and Harvest - 1901, reissued the same year as King Midas The Journal of Arthur Stirling - 1903 Off For West Point - 1903 From Port to Port - 1903 On Guard - 1903 A Strange Cruise - 1903 The West Point Rivals - 1903 A West Point Treasure - 1903 A Cadet's Honor - 1903 Cliff, the Naval Cadet - 1903 The Cruise of the Training Ship - 1903 Prince Hagen - 1903 Manassas: A Novel of the War - 1904, reissued in 1959 as Theirs be the Guilt A Captain of Industry - 1906 The Jungle - 1906 The Overman - 1907 The Industrial Republic - 1907 The Metropolis - 1908 The Money Changers - 1908 Samuel The Seeker - 1910 Love's Pilgrimage - 1911 Damaged Goods - 1913 Sylvia - 1913 Sylvia's Marriage - 1914 King Coal - 1917 The Goslins - 1918 Jimmie Higgins - 1919 Debs and the Poets - 1920 100% - The Story of a Patriot - 1920 The Spy - 1920 The Book of Life - 1921 They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second Coming - 1922 The Millennium - 1924 The Goslings - 1924 Mammonart - 1925 The Spokesman's Secretary - 1926 Money Writes! - 1927 Oil! - 1927 Boston, 2 vols. - 1928 Mountain City - 1930 Roman Holiday - 1931 The Wet Parade - 1931 American Outpost - 1932 The Way Out (novel) - 1933 Immediate Epic - 1933 The Lie Factory Starts - 1934 The Book of Love (novel) - 1934 Depression Island - 1935 Co-op: a Novel of Living Together - 1936 The Gnomobile - 1936, 1962 Wally for Queen - 1936 No Pasaran!: A Novel of the Battle of Madrid - 1937 The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America - 1937 Little Steel - 1938 Our Lady - 1938 Expect No Peace - 1939 Marie Antoinette (novel) - 1939 Telling The World - 1939 Your Million Dollars - 1939 World's End - 1940 World's End Impending - 1940

Between Two Worlds - 1941 Dragon's Teeth - 1942 Wide Is the Gate - 1943 Presidential Agent, 1944 Dragon Harvest - 1945 A World to Win - 1946 A Presidential Mission - 1947 A Giant's Strength - 1948 Limbo on the Loose - 1948 One Clear Call - 1948 O Shepherd, Speak! - 1949 Another Pamela - 1950 Schenk Stefan! - 1951 A Personal Jesus - 1952 The Return of Lanny Budd - 1953 The Cup of Fury - 1956 What Didymus Did - UK 1954 / It Happened to Didymus - US 1958 Theirs be the Guilt - 1959 Affectionately Eve - 1961 The Coal War - 1976 Autobiographical The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair. With Maeve Elizabeth Flynn III. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962. My Lifetime in Letters. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1960. Non-fiction Good Health and How We Won It: With an Account of New Hygiene (1909) - 1909 The Fasting Cure - 1911 The Profits of Religion - 1917 The Brass Check - 1919 The McNeal-Sinclair Debate on Socialism - 1921 The Goose-step: A Study of American Education - 1923 Letters to Judd, an American Workingman - 1925 Mental Radio: Does it work, and how? - 1930, 1962 Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox - 1933 We, People of America, and how we ended poverty : a true story of the future - 1933 I, Governor of California - and How I Ended Poverty - 1933 The Epic Plan for California - 1934 I, Candidate for Governor - and How I Got Licked - 1935 Epic Answers: How to End Poverty in California (1935) - 1934 What God Means to Me - 1936 Upton Sinclair on the Soviet Union - 1938[56] Letters to a Millionaire - 1939 Drama Plays of Protest: The Naturewoman, The Machine, The Second-Story Man, Prince Hagen - 1912 The Pot Boiler - 1913 Hell: A Verse Drama and Photoplay - 1924 Singing Jailbirds: A Drama in Four Acts - 1924 Bill Porter: A Drama of O. Henry in Prison - 1925 The Enemy Had It Too: A Play in Three Acts - 1950 As editor The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest - 1915

See also

• Will H. Kindig, a supporter on the Los Angeles City Council

Notes

Footnotes

Bibliography

Further reading

• Arthur, Anthony (2006), Radical Innocent Upton Sinclair, New York: Random House .
• William A. Bloodworth, Jr., Upton Sinclair. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.
• Lauren Coodley, editor, The Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair's California. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2004.
• Lauren Coodley, Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
• Engs, Ruth Clifford, [Ed] Unseen Upton Sinclair: Nine Unpublished Stories, Essays and Other Works. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2009.
• Ronald Gottesman, Upton Sinclair: An Annotated Checklist. Kent State University Press, 1973.
• Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair, American Rebel. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co, 1975.
• Kevin Mattson, Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006.
• Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair and the EPIC Campaign in California. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991.
• Kerwin Swint, Mudslingers: The Twenty-five Dirtiest Political Campaigns of All Time. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006.
• Jon A. Yoder, Upton Sinclair. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975.
• Martin Zanger, "Upton Sinclair as California's Socialist Candidate for Congress, 1920," Southern California Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4 (Winter 1974), pp. 359–73.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Upton Sinclair.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Upton Sinclair

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Upton Sinclair

• Works by Sinclair at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Upton Sinclair in audio format from LibriVox
• Works by or about Upton Sinclair in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• The Jungle Department of American Studies, University of Virginia
• The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest, Bartleby.com
• Guide to the Upton Sinclair Collection, Lilly Library, Indiana University
• Phelps, Christopher (26 June 2006), The Fictitious Suppression of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, History News network .
• Upton Sinclair, "EPIC", Museum of the City of San Francisco
• "A Tribute To Two Sinclairs", Sinclair Lewis & Upton Sinclair
• Information about Sinclair and Progressive Journalism today
• "Upton Sinclair", American Writers: A Journey Through History, C-SPAN .
• Upton Sinclair at Find a Grave

v t e Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1926–1950) Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (declined) (1926) Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield (1927) The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1928) Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin (1929) Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge (1930) Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes (1931) The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1932) The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling (1933) Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Pafford Miller (1934) Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson (1935) Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis (1936) Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1937) The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand (1938) The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1940) In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow (1942) Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair (1943) Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin (1944) A Bell for Adano by John Hersey (1945) All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1947) Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener (1948) Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens (1949) The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1950) Complete list (1918–1925) (1926–1950) (1951–1975) (1976–2000) (2001–2025)

v t e California Democratic Party Chairpersons John McEnery Roosevelt Pelosi Brown Angelides Press Torres Burton Gub./Lt. Gub. Nominees Maguire/Hutchinson (1898) Lane/Dockweiler (1902) Bell/Toland (1906) Bell/Spellacy (1910) Curtin/Snyder (1914) None/Snyder (1918) Woolwine/Shearer (1922) Wardell/Dunbar (1926) Young/Welsh (1930) Sinclair/Downey (1934) Olson/Patterson (1938, 1942) Roosevelt/Shelley (1946) Roosevelt/None (1950) Graves/Roybal (1954) P. Brown/Anderson (1958, 1962, 1966) Unruh/Alquist (1970) J. Brown/Dymally (1974, 1978) Bradley/McCarthy (1982, 1986) Feinstein/McCarthy (1990) K. Brown/Davis (1994) Davis/Bustamante (1998, 2002, 2003) Angelides/Garamendi (2006) J. Brown/Newsom (2010)

Authority control WorldCat VIAF: 32002923 LCCN: n79127862 ISNI: 0000 0001 2278 0173 GND: 118797395 SELIBR: 225270 SUDOC: 027139913 BNF: cb11924897n NLA: 35501455 NDL: 00526223 NKC: jn19990007989

Persondata
Name	Sinclair, Upton Beall, Sr.
Alternative names	Sinclair, Upton
Short description	American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist
Date of birth	20 September 1878
Place of birth	Baltimore, Maryland
Date of death	25 November 1968
Place of death	Bound Brook, New Jersey