Upton Sinclair

Throughout his life Upton Sinclair rarely encountered a cause he wouldn’t take to a soapbox about. An advocate for socialism, health, temperance, and free speech, he is best known for his classic muckraking novel The Jungle (1906), a landmark work that used meticulous reporting to uncover the atrocious conditions at Chicago stockyards.

Although he wrote fiction, Sinclair was a prominent member of the Progressive Era’s muckrakers (so dubbed by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt), investigative journalists and writers who exposed economic inequality, unsafe working conditions, and corporate corruption to spur government reform.

Early life

Sinclair was born in 1878 to Upton Beall Sinclair, Sr., an unsuccessful liquor salesman who suffered from chronic, severe alcoholism, and Priscilla Harden Sinclair, the daughter of a wealthy Baltimore railroad executive. His father’s addiction meant the family often lived in squalor and poverty. That life was juxtaposed against the luxury he experienced spending summers in the country with his grandparents. He described his childhood as “a series of Cinderella transformations; one night I would be sleeping on a vermin-ridden sofa in a lodging house, and the next night under silken coverlets in a fashionable home.” The exposure to the contrasts between the world’s “haves” and “have-nots” at a young age led him to socialism later in his life.

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His mother read to the young Sinclair, who was so captivated by books that he learned to read by the time he was five. He entered public school at 10 and entered the College of the City of New York at 14. It was there that he enjoyed his first success as a writer, selling a story about a pet bird to a magazine for $25. After graduating in 1897, he studied law at Columbia University but didn’t graduate, instead earning money writing jokes for newspapers and cartoonists and adventure stories for pulp magazines.

In 1900 Sinclair married his first wife, Meta Fuller, the daughter of a friend of his mother. Their marriage was deeply unhappy and marked by severe financial hardship. Their only child, David Sinclair, was born in 1901. Meta Sinclair engaged in a high-profile affair with the poet Harry Kemp, leading Sinclair to hire a private detective to prove her infidelity—a requirement for divorce in New York at the time—resulting in a scandalous divorce in 1911.

Sinclair would write more than 80 books. His first four novels—King Midas (1901, first published as Springtime and Harvest), Prince Hagen (1903), The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903), and a Civil War novel, Manassas (1904)—received positive reviews but did not sell well.

The Jungle

Manassas, a novel about the Civil War, caught the attention of a magazine editor who gave Sinclair the assignment that would change his life.

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In 1904 Fred Warren, the editor of the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, sent Sinclair undercover to investigate conditions in the Chicago stockyards.

Over the course of seven weeks, Sinclair went undercover in the sprawling one-square-mile district known as “Packingtown.” Dressed in shabby work clothes and carrying a lunch box, he blended in among the laborers on the killing floors and in processing plants. Sinclair interviewed scores of stockyard workers and their families, as well as local doctors, lawyers, social workers, and union leaders. He documented gruesome details of workplace hazards—including slaughterhouse workers losing fingers to unshielded machinery, suffering severe acid burns in rendering vats, and contracting tuberculosis in dark, unventilated rooms. He recorded countless sanitary abuses, noting how diseased cattle, rat droppings, floor sweepings, and poisoned rat bread were routinely mixed in with meat as it was being ground.

The result was The Jungle, first published in serial form by Appeal to Reason in 1905 and then as a book in 1906. Though intended to create sympathy for the immigrant workers in the meatpacking industry, the novel instead aroused widespread public indignation at the low quality of and impurities in processed meats. Sinclair sent a copy of his novel to U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, who in turn ordered an official investigation of Chicago slaughterhouses, which spurred Congress to pass landmark Progressive Era regulatory legislation: the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. As Sinclair commented at the time, “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

More novels and politics

The Jungle became a best seller, and Sinclair used the proceeds to open Helicon Hall, a cooperative-living venture in Englewood, New Jersey. This experiment was inspired by a model developed by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The building was destroyed by fire (possible arson, because of his socialist views) in 1907, whereupon the project was abandoned.

Sinclair and his second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough, moved to Pasadena, California, in 1916. His muckraking novels continued with King Coal (1917), which is about the poor working conditions in the mining industry. With The Brass Check (1919), Sinclair tackled the financial interests and supposed “free press” principles of major newspapers and the yellow journalism they often engaged in to attract readers. His novel Oil! (1927) was based on the Teapot Dome Scandal (it loosely served as the basis of the Academy Award-winning film There Will Be Blood [2007]), and Boston (1928) was inspired by the Sacco-Vanzetti case. His searing novel The Wet Parade (1931; film 1932) is about the tragedy of alcoholism, and The Flivver King (1937) tells the story of Henry Ford and how “scientific management” replaced skilled workers in the automotive industry.

During the economic crisis of the 1930s, Sinclair organized the EPIC (End Poverty in California) socialist reform movement and registered as a Democrat. His 1934 bid for the governorship of California—he ran on the EPIC platform, which featured proposals for state-administered economic relief and reforms throughout a number of societal institutions—was his most successful political campaign. (He had run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1906 and 1920, for the U.S. Senate in 1922, and for the governorship of California in 1926 and 1930, each time running as a Socialist, and each time he lost.)

The 1934 campaign was surprisingly popular, helping to build and push to the left the California Democratic Party and to influence U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, exemplifying how unions and populist movements pushed Roosevelt toward expanded federal economic intervention during the Great Depression, but once again he lost. He was defeated by a joint propaganda campaign orchestrated by the conservative political and business establishment, newspaper moguls, and Hollywood studio bosses, who brazenly portrayed him as an American communist. Using admen, media consultants, and assorted “dirty tricks,” opponents waged an anti-Sinclair battle that has been called one of the most well-orchestrated smear campaigns in American history; bogus interviews were staged and run as legitimate newsreels in movie theaters, a forerunner of fake news and television attack ads decades later. Sinclair recounted the campaign in I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935) and said about his experience in politics, “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.”

Inspired by a tour of the northern California redwoods in 1934, Sinclair wrote a children’s story called The Gnomobile. It was one of the first books for children with an environmentalist message, and it was later adapted as a film by Walt Disney in 1967. Sinclair again reached a wide audience with his Lanny Budd series, 11 contemporary historical novels, beginning with World’s End (1940), that were constructed around an antifascist hero who witnesses the events surrounding World War II. For Dragon’s Teeth (1942), the third novel in the series, about the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930s, Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943.

Of his autobiographical writings, American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences (1932; also published as Candid Reminiscences: My First Thirty Years) was reworked and extended in The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962). My Lifetime in Letters (1960) is a collection of letters written to Sinclair.

In his autobiography Sinclair offered the following assessment of his life’s work:

I don’t know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do they will find two words there—“Social Justice.”