name	Upton Sinclair
birth date	September 20, 1878
birth place	Baltimore, Maryland
spouse	Meta Fuller (1902-1911) Mary Craig Kimbrough, (1913-1961) Mary Elizabeth Willis (1961-1967)
death date	November 25, 1968
death date	November 25, 1968
death place	Bound Brook, New Jersey
occupation	Novelist, writer, journalist, political activist
nationality	American
notable work(s)	The Jungle
signature	Upton Sinclair signature.svg }}

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was an American author who wrote close to 100 books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the 20th century, acquiring particular fame for his 1906 muckraking novel ''The Jungle''. 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. ''Time'' magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence."

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. 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 19th century. Living in two social settings affected him and greatly influenced his novels.

In 1888, the Sinclair family moved to the Bronx, New York, where Sinclair entered the City College of New York, then a prep school, at the age of thirteen. He wrote dime novels and magazine articles to pay for his tuition. He graduated in 1897 and then studied for a time at Columbia University.

Career

In 1904 Sinclair spent seven weeks in disguise, working undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants to research his fictional exposé, ''The Jungle''. When it appeared in 1906, 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. The colony burned down under suspicious circumstances within a year.

During his years with his second wife, Mary Craig (or Craig, as she is called in references), Sinclair wrote or produced several films. Recruited by Charlie Chaplin, Sinclair and Mary Craig produced Eisenstein's ''¡Qué viva México!'' in 1930-32.

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. He is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C., next to his third wife, Mary Willis, who died a year before him.

Aside from his political and social writings, Sinclair took an interest in psychic phenomena and experimented with telepathy. His book entitled ''Mental Radio'' was published in 1930 and included accounts of his wife Mary's experiences and ability.

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

Political career

In the 1920s the Sinclairs moved to Monrovia, California, near Los Angeles, where Upton founded the state's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Wanting to pursue politics, he twice ran unsuccessfully for 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."

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. Sinclair's platform, known as the End Poverty in California movement (EPIC), galvanized the support of the Democratic Party, and Sinclair gained its nomination.

Severe dust storms during the Great Depression made farming on the Great Plains impossible, and hundreds of thousands of Southern and Great Plains residents migrated westward in the 1930s in the hope of finding work and a new life. Sinclair's plan to end poverty quickly became a controversial issue under the pressure of so many migrants. Conservatives considered his proposal an attempted communist takeover of their state and quickly opposed him, using propaganda to portray Sinclair as a staunch communist. At the same time, American and Soviet communists disassociated themselves from him as a capitalist. Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein was deeply involved in Sinclair's campaign. Heinlein tried to obscure this in later life, as he wanted to keep his personal politics separate from his public image as an author.

After his loss to Merriam, Sinclair abandoned EPIC and politics to return to writing. In 1935 Sinclair published ''I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked'', in which he described the techniques employed by Merriam's supporters, including the 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."

Marriage and family

Sinclair married his first wife, Meta Fuller, in 1902. 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 the Confederacy". 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).

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''

In ''The Jungle'' (1906), Sinclair gave a scathing indictment of unregulated capitalism as exemplified in the meatpacking industry. His descriptions of both the unsanitary conditions and the inhumane conditions experienced by the workers shocked and galvanized readers. Sinclair had intended it as an attack upon capitalist enterprise, but readers reacted viscerally. Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half. Sinclair lamented: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." The novel was so influential that it spurred government regulation of the industry, as well as the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

''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. She asked him to publish it under his name. 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."

''Sylvia's Marriage'' (1914), Craig and Sinclair collaborated on a sequel, also published by John C. Winston Company under only Sinclair's name.

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''."

The Lanny Budd series

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

The series covers in sequence much of the political history of the Western world, particularly Europe and America, in the first half of the twentieth century. Out of print and almost totally forgotten today, the novels 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.

The novels in the Lanny Budd series are:

Later references to Sinclair

Sinclair is extensively featured in Harry Turtledove's American Empire trilogy, an alternate history series 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.

In the late 1990s, the television program ''Working'' used as its setting a company named Upton Weber. With the show's implicit criticism of contemporary working conditions, however watered down for popular audiences, the name suggests a reference both to Upton Sinclair and Max Weber.

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.

Films

''The Jungle'' (1906) was adapted for film in 1914. Sinclair appears at the beginning and end of the film "as a form of endorsement."

''The Wet Parade'' (1931) became a film directed by Victor Fleming in 1932. It starred Robert Young, Myrna Loy, Walter Huston, and Jimmy Durante.

''The Gnomobile'' (1937) was the basis of a 1967 Disney musical motion picture, ''The Gnome-Mobile''.

''Oil!'' (1927) was the basis of ''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.

Works

Fiction

Autobiographical

''My Lifetime in Letters'' - 1960

''The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair'' - 1962, assisted by Maeve Elizabeth Flynn III

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

''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

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

References

Sources

Anthony Arthur, ''Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair'' (NY: Random House, 2006)

William A. Bloodworth, Jr., ''Upton Sinclair'' (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977)

Ronald Gottesman, ''Upton Sinclair: An Annotated Checklist'' (Kent State University Press, 1973)

Leon Harris, ''Upton Sinclair, American Rebel'' (NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 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'' (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991)

Upton Sinclair, ''The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair'' (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962)

Upton Sinclair, ''My Lifetime in Letters'' (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1960)

Swint, Kerwin C., Mudslingers: The Twenty-five Dirtiest Political Campaigns of All Time, (Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT, 2006)

Jon A. Yoder, ''Upton Sinclair'' (NY: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1975)

External links

Works by Upton Sinclair in audio format from LibriVox

Works by Sinclair Internet Archive

''The Jungle'' Department of American Studies, University of Virginia

''The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest'' Bartleby.com

''Uppie Redux'' David Denby, ''The New Yorker'', August 28, 2006.

Biography Schoolnet

Guide to the Upton Sinclair Collection Lilly Library, Indiana University

''The Fictitious Suppression of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle'' Christopher Phelps, ''History News network, 6-26-2006

''Upton Sinclair and Timothy McVeigh'' David Martin, June 2, 2001

Article by Sinclair on EPIC Museum of the City of San Francisco

Information about Sinclair and Progressive Journalism today

Category:1878 births Category:1968 deaths Category:American activists Category:American novelists Category:American socialists Category:California politicians Category:City College of New York alumni Category:Columbia University alumni Category:American investigative journalists Category:Members of the Socialist Party of America Category:People from Baltimore, Maryland Category:People from Englewood, New Jersey Category:People from the San Gabriel Valley Category:Pulitzer Prize for the Novel winners Category:American people of Scottish descent Category:Writers from California Category:Writers from New York Category:People associated with the Dil Pickle Club Category:Burials at Rock Creek Cemetery

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