Upton Sinclair
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Upton Sinclair "I never met a Socialist, or a Socialist cause, that I didn't like." |
Upton Beall Sinclair (
September 20,
1878 –
November 25,
1968) was a prolific
American author who wrote over 90 books in many genres, often advocating
socialist views, and achieved considerable popularity in the first half of the
Twentieth Century. He gained particular fame for his novel,
The Jungle (
1906), which dealt with conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and caused a public uproar that ultimately led to the passage of the
Pure Food and Drug Act in
1906.
However, the main point of
The Jungle was lost on the public, overshadowed by his descriptions of unsanitary conditions in the packing plants. The public health concerns dealt with in
The Jungle are actually far less significant than the human tragedy lived by his main character and other workers in the plants. His main goal for the book was to demonstrate the inhuman conditions of the wage earner under capitalism, not to inspire public health reforms in how the packing was done. Indeed, Sinclair lamented the effect of his book and the public uproar that resulted: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Still, the fame and fortune he gained from publishing
The Jungle enabled him to write books on almost every issue of social injustice in the Twentieth Century.
Sinclair lived much of his life in
Monrovia, California and later in
Buckeye, Arizona, but near the end of his life he moved to
Bound Brook, New Jersey. He took an interest in psychic phenomena and experimented with telepathy, writing a book titled
Mental Radio, published in 1930.Sinclair established a socialist commune called Helicon Hall Colony in
1906 with proceeds from his novel
The Jungle. One of those who joined was the novelist and playwright
Sinclair Lewis, who worked there as a janitor. The colony burned down in
1907, apparently from arson.
Sinclair faced what he would later call "the most difficult ethical problem of my life," when he was told in confidence by
Sacco and Vanzetti's former attorney Fred Moore that they were guilty and how their alibis were supposedly arranged[
1]. However, in the letter revealing that discussion with Moore, Sinclair also wrote, "I had heard that he [Moore] was using drugs. I knew that he had parted from the defense committee after the bitterest of quarrels … Moore admitted to me that the men themselves had never admitted their guilt to him." Although this episode has been used by some to claim that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and that Sinclair knew that when he wrote his novel
Boston, this account has been disputed by Sinclair biographer Greg Mitchell[
2]
Sinclair's platform for the California gubernatorial race of
1934, known as
EPIC (End Poverty in California), galvanized the support of the Democratic Party, and Sinclair gained its nomination.
Conservatives in California were themselves galvanized by this, as they saw it as an attempted
Communist takeover of their state and used massive political propaganda portraying Sinclair as a Communist, even as he was being portrayed by American and Soviet Communists as a
capitalist following the
Que Viva Mexico! debacle.
Robert A. Heinlein, the
science fiction author, was deeply involved in Sinclair's campaign, a point which Heinlein tried to obscure from later biographies, after Heinlein's political views shifted sharply to the right.
Sinclair was defeated by
Frank F. Merriam in the election and largely abandoned EPIC and politics to return to writing. However, the race of 1934, would become known as the first race to use modern campaign techniques, such as motion pictures.
Sinclair was married three times.
His papers, photographs, and first editions of most of his books are found at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
An early success was the Civil War novel
Manassas, written in
1903 and published a year later. Originally projected as the opening book of a trilogy, the success of
The Jungle caused him to drop such plans, although he did revise
Manassas decades later by "moderating some of the exuberance of the earlier version"; a description very much of a relative kind.
The Jungle brought to light many major issues in America such as poverty and other social wrongs. It is rumored that Sinclair was a racist, and there is some foundation for this. Upton Sinclair grew up in the Nineteenth Century, where epithets were used to refer to people of certain ethnic backgrounds. In his books, he used these to realistically portray the way in which foreigners and minorities were referred to and treated. For example, in his book
Oil!, one character uses a disparaging word to refer to non-Jewish people and a different character uses a disparaging word to refer to Jewish people. Some argue that no offense is intended or implied and that the books were written to accurately reflect the way people thought during the time. However in other books, Sinclair goes well beyond the simple use of racial epithets in quotes. For example in
The Jungle, it is the narrator (perhaps speaking for Sinclair himself) who describes
African Americans in a highly negative light. To some, this description is meant merely to capture the mindset of the
Eastern European immigrants who are the book's protagonists (a group which was itself held in low regard in America at the time). To others, the descriptions reflected what was possibly Sinclair's own racist views. Although some might argue that at the time
The Jungle was published, the epithets against blacks were unnoticed by both his supporters and detractors, likely these were his white supporters, as African American readers would have been offended by the epithets in a post
-Plessy v. Ferguson, dawning-of-the-Jim-Crow-Era period. It is considered erroneous to assume that if the majority classes expressed no offense at Sinclair's views, they were not offensive to his black contemporaries who had no platform on which to express their umbrage with Sinclair's portrayals of them. Nevertheless,
The Jungle's impact was far-reaching.
Sinclair helped found the California chapter of the
American Civil Liberties Union in the
1920s.
Between 1940 and 1953 Sinclair wrote 11 novels about an American named Lanny Budd that, read in sequence, detailed much of the political history of the Western world in the first half of the twentieth century. Almost totally forgotten today, they were all
bestsellers upon publication and were published in 21 countries. The third book in the series,
Dragon's Teeth, won the
Pulitzer Prize in
1943.
Long out of print, the Lanny Budd series have recently been re-issued by Simon Publications. For technical reasons, each original volume is issued in two parts, forming a 22-volume set.
In
Sinclair Lewis' novel
It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair is depicted as an
eccentric and a supporter of
fascism out of opportunistic motives, who is rewarded for his support of an American fascist government by being made ambassador to Great Britain.
Sinclair is featured in
Harry Turtledove's
American Empire trilogy as the Socialist Party winner of the 1920 and 1924 United States presidential elections.
Sinclair is featured as one of the main characters in
Chris Bachelder's satirical fictional book 'U.S.!: a Novel'. Sinclair is the frequently assassinated and resurrected personification of the contemporary failings of the American-left and portrayed as an ineffectual and out of touch reformer always trying to implement American Socialism.
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 Harvest - 1901
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 Hagan - 1903
Manassas - 1904
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 - 1909
Good Health and How We Won It - 1909
The Machine (novel) - 1911
King Coal - 1917
The Profits of Religion - 1918
Jimmie Higgins - 1919
The Brass Check - 1919
THE SPY - 1920
Oil! - 1927
Boston - 1928
Mental Radio - 1930
Roman Holiday - 1931
American Outpost - 1932
I, Candidate For Governor: And How I Got Licked. - 1935
The Flivver King - 1937
World's End - 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
Presidential Mission - 1947
One Clear Call - 1948
O Shepherd, Speak! - 1949
Schenk Stefan! - 1951
The Return of Lanny Budd - 1953
The Cup of Fury - 1956
What Didymus Did - UK 1954 /
It Happened to Didymus - US 1958
The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair - 1962
*
Free ebook of Upton Sinclair at
Project Gutenberg*
"The Fictitious Suppression of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle" by Christopher Phelps in ''History News network, 6-26-2006*
An article by Sinclair on EPIC at the Museum of the City of
San Francisco*[
3]An article in the Los Angeles Times about how Sinclair knew
Sacco and Vanzetti to be guilty, but concealed the information
*
1992 audio interview of Greg Mitchell, author of The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics. Interview by Don Swaim of CBS Radio. RealAudio
