Upton Sinclair
Y Upton Sinclair
BORN :
DIED :
1878, Baltimore, Maryland
1968, Bound Brook, New Jersey
NATIONALITY :
GENRE :
American
Fiction
MAJOR WORKS :
The Jungle (1906)
Overview
Upton Sinclair was a writer whose main concerns were politics and economics, and whose ideas about literature were
inseparable from his dreams of social justice. Since the essential purpose of literature, for Sinclair, was the betterment of
human conditions, he was a ‘‘muckraker,’’ a propagandist, an
interpreter of socialism and a critic of capitalism, a novelist
more concerned with content than form, a journalistic
chronicler of his times rather than an enduring artist. Since
World War II, his literary reputation has declined, yet The
Jungle (1906) is one of the best known and most historically
significant of American novels, and Sinclair himself remains
an important figure in American political and cultural history.
Works in Biographical and Historical
Context
Becoming a ‘‘Real’’ Writer Upton Beall Sinclair Jr.
was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20,
Upton Sinclair
Sinclair, Upton, 1942, photograph. AP Images.
1878, into an aristocratic, but impoverished, Southern
family whose financial difficulties dated back to the Civil
War era. His father, a traveling salesman who turned to
alcohol to cope with the unaccustomed pressures of having to work for a living, rarely made enough money to
provide Upton and his mother Priscilla with some measure of comfort. This life of genteel hardship contrasted
sharply with that of Priscilla Sinclair’s wealthy Baltimore
relatives; it was a difference that disturbed young Sinclair,
who could not understand why some people were rich
and others poor. Many years later, at the age of eightyfive, he remarked at a gathering held in his honor that he
still did not understand.
A sickly but precocious child, Sinclair entered New
York’s City College at the age of fourteen. Determined to
become financially independent from his unreliable
father, he immediately began submitting jokes, riddles,
poems, and short stories to popular magazines; by the
time he graduated, Sinclair was selling full-length adventure novels (which appeared under various pseudonyms)
to Street Smith, one of the day’s foremost publishers of
pulp fiction. During this period, the teenager learned to
write quickly, prolifically, and with a minimum of effort,
turning out an average of six to eight thousand words per
day, seven days per week.
After receiving his degree, Sinclair went on to graduate school at Columbia University, where he was attracted
to the romantic poets and their belief in the power of
literature to make an appreciable difference in the world.
To this end, he decided to give up hack writing and
concentrate on ‘‘real’’ writing instead. The next few years
were filled with nothing but misery for Sinclair, his wife
Meta (whom he married in 1900), and their infant son
David as they watched his first three novels fade into
oblivion soon after being published. His next novel, however, Manassas (1904), proved to be the turning point in
his career. With its theme of a rich young Southerner who
rejects plantation life to join the abolitionist movement,
Manassas demonstrated the author’s growing interest in
radical politics. The book eventually brought him to the
attention of the American Socialists, a movement that
had origins in the revolutionary activity in Europe in the
mid-nineteenth century as well as the women’s rights,
abolition, and utopian movements at the same period in
America.
Into The Jungle Once in contact with members of
the socialist movement, Sinclair began studying philosophy and was soon invited to contribute articles to major
socialist publications. In late 1904 Sinclair was encouraged to write about the ‘‘wage slaves’’ of industry in the
same way he had written about the ‘‘chattel slaves’’ on
the Southern plantations in Manassas. Sinclair took as his
starting point an article he had recently worked on dealing
with an unsuccessful strike in the Chicago meat-packing
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Upton Sinclair
LITERARY AND HISTORICAL
CONTEMPORARIES
Sinclair’s famous contemporaries include:
John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960): American businessman and philanthropist. Rockefeller was the only
son of billionaire industrialist John D. Rockefeller Sr., the
founder of Standard Oil. Rockefeller Jr. oversaw the
breakup of the oil monopoly but expanded his father’s
work in philanthropy and the arts.
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956): American journalist and
essayist. Mencken was at once a satirist and an observer
of American cultural and political life. As a critic, he
championed the works of Joseph Conrad and Friedrich
Nietzsche; as a journalist, he lampooned religious zealotry and hypocrisy. Mencken’s unpredictable tastes are
often described as ‘‘elitist.’’
Fiorello LaGuardia (1882–1947): American politician. As
mayor of New York City during the Great Depression,
LaGuardia was a major figure in the implementation of
New Deal public works projects and in weeding out
corruption.
Carl Sandburg (1878–1967): American poet and writer.
As a young journalist in Chicago, Sandburg became
interested in the poetic possibilities of the booming
Midwestern city. His poem ‘‘Chicago’’ (1918) is a classic,
celebrating the city as the ‘‘Hog Butcher for the World /
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat.’’ Like Sinclair, Sandburg
was also a socialist.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962): American activist and
humanitarian. During Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four
terms as president, Eleanor became a pioneering First
Lady, writing newspaper columns, working for civil
rights, and promoting her husband’s New Deal policies.
After Franklin’s death in 1945, she continued advocating for women’s rights and civil rights.
industry. Having received an advance for his novel-to-be,
Sinclair moved his family to a farm in New Jersey and set
out for Chicago in November 1904, promising to ‘‘shake
the popular heart and blow the roof off of the industrial
tea-kettle.’’ It was, notes William A. Bloodworth in his
study Upton Sinclair, a trip that ‘‘made a traumatic, lifelong impression on him.’’ Explains the critic,
What World War I meant to Ernest Hemingway,
what the experiences of poverty and crime meant to
Jack London, the combination of visible oppression
and underlying corruption in Chicago in 1904
meant to Upton Sinclair. This kind of evidence, this
kind of commitment to social justice became the
primal experience of his fiction. For at least the next
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four decades, . . . Sinclair would continually retell
the story of what happened to him in Chicago.
Sinclair’s investigative work for his novel, The Jungle,
took seven weeks, during which time he talked with workers and visited meat-packing plants, both on an official
basis and undercover. ‘‘I sat at night in the homes of the
workers, foreign-born and native, and they told me their
stories, one after one, and I made notes of everything,’’ he
recalled. Sinclair fashioned the resulting story around the
experiences of a fictional Lithuanian immigrant who arrives
in Chicago fully expecting a piece of the American dream;
instead, he is confronted with the reality of poverty, backbreaking labor, and death. As Bloodworth writes, he is
‘‘brutalized by working conditions in the Chicago packing
houses and exploited by corrupt politics.’’ To dramatize
his story of pain and oppression, Sinclair included some
unpleasant passages on the meat-packing process itself,
focusing on the diseased and chemically tainted condition
of the products manufacturers were offering to the American public.
Because Sinclair had a political purpose in writing his
novel, he was left with the problem of ending The Jungle
on a note of socialist hope. His hero, too beaten down to
lead the revolution, instead stumbles into a political meeting and undergoes what most critics call a ‘‘religious conversion’’ to socialism. Sinclair completed The Jungle in late
1905; balking at the subject matter, his publisher rejected
it. It took four more tries—and the house of Doubleday’s
fact-checking trip to Chicago—to get the novel published.
Though The Jungle was written as a socialist novel, it
was promoted as an exposé of the food industry, which was
an issue that easily stirred up outcry at the turn of the
century. The Jungle shocked and infuriated Americans; it
was, in fact, this widespread revulsion that made the book a
best seller and its author a world-famous writer. But never
again did Sinclair write a novel with quite the impact of The
Jungle.
The Next Acts Between 1906 and 1914, Sinclair’s career
took several directions. He organized a communal living
experiment in New Jersey only to see the building burn
down in March 1907. Continuing to write novels about
socialism, and seeking answers to personal problems, especially the breakup of his marriage, Sinclair made several
attempts at utopian communal living. He also wrote about
diet and health; about the corrupt worlds of the wealthy
and of high finance; about feminism and the modern marriage; and about sexually transmitted disease.
Around 1914 Sinclair found his footing again, beginning a successful second marriage (to Mary Craig Kimbrough) and relocating to southern California. There he
wrote King Coal (1917), a Jungle–esque look at the lives
of miners in Colorado. It was less successful than the
earlier venture, however, as it was released at the dawn
of World War I when Americans were far more interested
in submarines than they were in coal or labor.
GALE CONTEXTUAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
Upton Sinclair
It was not until the end of the 1920s that Sinclair had
another major novelistic success, and that was with a pair
of novels again dealing with current events, Oil! (1927)
and Boston (1928). Oil! is a long, expansive novel based
loosely on the oil scandals of the Harding administration
(1921–23) and revolves around the son of a prosperous
oilman who finds himself torn between loyalty to his father
and the radical politics he has come to believe in. Boston is
a fictional account of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, in which
two Italian American anarchists were arrested, tried, and
then executed for murder in 1927; it is widely believed
that the men’s political beliefs—including confidence in
violence against the government as a solution—were used
to convict them unfairly. The novel represents Sinclair’s
best effort at using his medium as a means to publicize and
interpret contemporary events.
Sinclair did not just write about politics in novel form,
but actually attempted to influence them. In 1934 he ran,
unsuccessfully, for governor of California on an antipoverty platform; his experience is reflected in his novel Co-Op
(1936). By the end of the 1930s, however, with the world
on the brink of yet another World War, Sinclair turned his
attentions to writing historical novels, detailing the major,
world-changing events in history from 1913 to 1950 as
told through the experiences of one character, Lanny
Budd. His writing career wound down in the 1950s.
When Sinclair died in 1968 most of the obituaries were
generous in their praise. Some of them noted one of the
main ironies of his career: that such an essentially gentle
person could have written some of the most socially combative works in American fiction.
Works in Literary Context
Muckraking While the novels of Sinclair—in particular
The Jungle—have become classic examples of ‘‘muckraking,’’ the term covers much more than just the politically
motivated novel. It primarily refers to a type of investigative
journalism that aims to expose large-scale, widespread fraud
and corruption by governments and institutions, as well
as the appalling social conditions of workers and slumdwellers. Muckraking was a popular journalistic practice in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but its
appeal—both for writers and readers—has persisted, with
many writers willing to hold the powerful accountable even
if nobody else will. Often, muckraking succeeds in bringing
about change: Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1962)
led to major safety regulations in the auto industry. At other
times, muckraking makes for a powerfully good read, when
such literary talents as Jessica Mitford feel called to investigate: Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963), an
exposé of the funeral industry, remains a classic of literary
journalism.
Works in Critical Context
The Jungle Writing about the nature of The Jungle’s
phenomenal success, Alfred Kazin observes, in his book
On Native Grounds,
COMMON HUMAN
EXPERIENCE
Sinclair was not the first writer, or the last, to decry the exploitation of workers. Here are some other works that illuminate the
plight of the ‘‘wage slave’’:
Sibyl, or The Two Nations (1845), a novel by Benjamin
Disraeli. Like Sinclair, Disraeli worked out his social philosophy through literature (though Disraeli was also a
successful politician). His novel Sibyl dramatizes the
severe contrast between rich and poor and details the
dire economic straits of the textile worker in England.
‘‘The Chimney Sweeper’’ (1789), a poem by William Blake,
from Songs of Innocence. Written in the voice of a
small child who was sent off to do the dangerous, lifeshortening work of cleaning chimneys, Blake’s poem suggests the nightmare of the chimney sweep’s life by
describing the boy’s unattainable fantasy of a different life.
Matewan (1987), a film directed by John Sayles. Based on
a true story, Matewan recounts a 1920 coal-miners’
strike in West Virginia after the workers’ attempt to
unionize is quashed.
The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a novel by John Steinbeck. In
Steinbeck’s Depression classic, the Joad family is forced
to leave their farm in Oklahoma and, with thousands of
others, migrate west in search of a better life. What they
find is too few jobs for too many workers, and industrial
farms in collusion to keep wages down. Consequently,
the dreamed-of future never arrives.
Maria Full of Grace (2004), a film written and directed by
Joshua Marston. The heroine is caught between two
forms of economic exploitation: her job in Colombia at a
sweat shop, and the dangerous decision she makes to
work as a ‘‘mule’’ smuggling drugs into the United States.
The Jungle attracted attention because it was obviously the most authentic and most powerful of the
muckraking novels. The romantic indignation of the
book gave it its fierce honesty, but the facts in it
gave Sinclair his reputation, for he had suddenly
given an unprecedented social importance to muckraking. . . . No one could doubt it, the evidence was
overwhelming: here in The Jungle was the great
news story of a decade written out in letters of fire.
But while few critics discount The Jungle’s importance, many maintain that the novel isn’t great literature.
Its plot and characterization have come under particularly
heavy fire, with Bookman’s Edward Clark Marsh, for
instance, arguing that ‘‘we do not need to be told that
thievery, and prostitution, and political jobbery, and economic slavery exist in Chicago. So long as these truths are
before us only as abstractions they are meaningless.’’ As
for its characters, Marsh found them underformed, while
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Isaac Bashevis Singer
Walter Rideout, writing in The Radical Novel in the United
States, saw the protagonist as a composite of many of the
people Sinclair would have met in Chicago. While this
is still a kind of flawed characterization, Rideout writes
that the characters’ ‘‘mere capacities for infinite suffering . . .
finally do come to stand for the masses themselves.’’ Many
reviewers were also disappointed with the book’s ending,
especially the abrupt switch from fiction to political rhetoric that occurs when the protagonist is ‘‘converted’’ to
socialism. Writing in The Strenuous Age in American Literature, Grant C. Knight observes that the final section ‘‘is
uplifting but it is also artificial, an arbitrary re-channelling
of the narrative flow, a piece of rhetoric instead of a logical
continuation of story.’’
Responses to Literature
Mookerjee, Rabindra Nath. Art for Social Justice: The
Major Novels of Upton Sinclair. Metuchen, N.J.:
Scarecrow Press, 1988.
Rideout, Walter. The Radical Novel in the United States
1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and
Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956.
Scott, Ivan. Upton Sinclair: The Forgotten Socialist.
Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996.
Sinclair, Upton. The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962.
Periodicals
Marsh, Edward Clark. Review of The Jungle. Bookman
(April 1906).
Y Isaac Bashevis Singer
1. The horrors of the meat-packing industry Sinclair
wrote about in The Jungle may be a thing of the past,
but the working life is far from easy. Read about the
modern-day struggles of the working poor in Barbara
Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By
in America (2001). What has changed? What remains
the same about the lives described in the two books?
2. One of Sinclair’s more successful novels, Boston, is
about a controversial real-life event. Using your
library and the Internet, research the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and write a paper in
which you put forward your own theory of why the
men were condemned.
BORN :
1904, Leoncin, Poland
DIED :
1988, Surfside, Florida
NATIONALITY :
GENRE :
American
Fiction
MAJOR WORKS :
Satan in Goray (1943)
The Family Moskat (1950)
3. Upton Sinclair is one of those novelists whose body
of work is forever overshadowed by one novel, in his
case The Jungle. Why is this? Read The Jungle and
another of Sinclair’s novels, and write an essay in
which you speculate on the justice or injustice of this
reputation. Be sure to consider the literary ‘‘quality’’
of the novels, as well as the historical circumstances
that might determine public interest.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Bloodworth, William A., Jr. Upton Sinclair. Boston:
Twayne, 1977.
Dell, Floyd. Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest.
New York: Doran, 1927.
Karsner, David. Sixteen Authors to One: Intimate Sketches
of Leading American Story Tellers. New York:
Copeland, 1928.
Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of
Modern American Prose Literature. New York:
Harcourt, 1942.
Knight, Grant C. The Strenuous Age in American
Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1954.
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Isaac Bashevis Singer
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, photograph.ª Jerry Bauer.
Reproduced by permission.
GALE CONTEXTUAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LITERATURE