Upton Sinclair Biography

American novelist, essayist, playwright, short story writer, and juvenile book writer, whose works reflect socialistic views. Sinclair stated in 1903 that "My Cause is the Cause of a man who has never yet been defeated, and whose whole being is one all devouring, God-given holy purpose". Among Sinclair's most famous books is THE JUNGLE (1906), to which the public reacted so violently that it launched a government investigation of the meatpacking plants of Chicago, and changed the food laws of America. Today his works are not widely read, mostly because writers with political and social ideals are not popular in the West - or East.

Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His family came from the ruined Southern aristocracy. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism shadowed Sinclair's childhood. When Sinclair was ten, the family moved to New York. He started to write dime novels at the age of 15 and produced ethnic jokes and hack fiction for pulp magazines to finance his studies at New York City College. In 1897 he enrolled Columbia University, determined to succeed while producing one poorly paid novellette per week. During these years he wrote Clif Faraday stories (as Ensign Clarke Fitch) and Mark Mallory Stories (as Lieutenant Frederick Garrison) for various boys' weeklies. Sinclair's productivity continued through his life: he published almost 100 books.

In 1900 Sinclair married his first wife (they divorced in 1911). The unhappy marriage led to the writing of SPRINGTIME AND HARVEST (1901, repub. as King Midas), a tale of penniless lovers. By 1904 Sinclair was moving toward a realistic fiction. He had become a regular reader of the Appeal to Reason, a socialist-populist weekly.

As a writer Sinclair gained fame in 1906 with the novel THE JUNGLE, a report on the dirty conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. In the story Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant, arrives in America dreaming of wealth, freedom, and opportunity. He finds work from the flourishing, filthy Chicago stockyards, where his new world visions fade in the hopeless "wage-slavery" and in the chaos of urban life.

The book won Sinclair fame and fortune, and led to the implementation of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. It had the deepest social impact since Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Its proceeds enabled Sinclair to establish and support the socialist commune Helicon Home Colony in Englewood, N.J. However, the commune for left-wing writers burnt down after a year.

The Jungle set the tone for Sinclair's later works. It was followed by studies of a group, an industry, or a region, among others THE METROPOLIS (1908), exploration of fashionable New York society, KING COAL (1917), a story about Colorado miner's strike of 1914, OIL! (1927), often considered Sinclair's most effective writing, and BOSTON (1928), a depiction of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which caused widespread outrage in the 1920s. In JIMMIE HIGGINS (1919) Sinclair portrayed the dilemma of American leftist who felt temporarily obliged to support the ruling classes of England and France during the World War I. Later during the Cold War Sinclair started correspondence with Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer to provide details for a novel about the development of the atomic bomb.

From 1915 Sinclair lived in Pasadena, California and later in Buckeye, Arizona. At the age of 24 he joined the Socialist Party. In 1934 he run for the governor of California, but failed on election - as in some other elections before. He spent the decade largely in other activities than writing novels: he experimented with telepathy, followed Sergey Eisenstein who tried to make movies in the U.S. and Mexico, and ran for political office. Sinclair reached again his reading audience in the 1940s with his Lanny Budd series, consisting 11 contemporary historical novels.

Its hero, the illegitime son of a munitions tycoon, always manages to find himself in the middle of decisive moments in history. He travels the world, meets such figures as Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler, Herman Göring, and Franklin Roosevelt, and is involved in international political intrigues. The first novel in the series, WORLD'S END (1940) narrates the events of Budd's life between 1913 and 1919. DRAGON'S TEETH (1942), which dealt with Germany's descent into Nazism during 1930s to 1934, won the Pulitzer Pize for fiction in 1943. As Lanny grows older, he becomes a secret agent for the president. The final novel, THE RETURN OF LANNY BUDD (1953) deals with hostile sentiment in the USA toward post-war Soviet Russia.

From Pasadena Sinclair suddenly moved in 1953 to a remote Arizona village of Buckeye. His second wife, whom he married in 1913, predeceased him in 1961, as did his third wife, in 1967. Sinclair died on November 25, 1968.