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Upton Sinclair


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Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), noted American muckraker, social activist, essayist, and Pulitzer Prize winning author wrote The Jungle (1906);

.... and so Jurgis learned a few things about the great and only Durham canned goods, which had become a national institution. They were regular alchemists at Durham's; .... They advertised "potted chicken," .... the things that went into the mixture were tripe, and the fat of pork, and beef suet, and hearts of beef, and finally the waste ends of veal, when they had any. They put these up in several grades, and sold them at several prices; but the contents of the cans all came out of the same hopper. And then there was "potted game" and "potted grouse," "potted ham," and "deviled ham"-- de-vyled, as the men called it. "De-vyled" ham was made out of the waste ends of smoked beef that were too small to be sliced by the machines; and also tripe, dyed with chemicals so that it would not show white; and trimmings of hams and corned beef; and potatoes, skins and all; and finally the hard cartilaginous gullets of beef, after the tongues had been cut out. All this ingenious mixture was ground up and flavored with spices to make it taste like something. Anybody who could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said Jurgis' informant; but it was hard to think of anything new in a place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long;--Ch. 9

Impoverished Lithuanian immigrants the Rudkus family are wage slaves to the Chicago meat-packing industry, working in appalling conditions under non-existent or unsafe sanitary practices. Sinclair immersed himself in the community of these people and his muckraking exposé details the shocking methods employed in procuring 'human grade' meat products. Harshly critical of the capitalist industrialist system, it led to meat inspection legislation and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Sinclair personally sent a copy of his book to then American President Theodore Roosevelt. Often ranked with Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in regard to its social impact, The Jungle was highly lauded by other such esteemed literary figures Jack London, H.L. Mencken, and George Bernard Shaw. Unlike Samuel Hopkins Adams's critical examination of the patent medicine industry The Great American Fraud (1906) which also contributed to the formation of the Pure Food and Drug Act, Sinclair's most famous work remains in print over a century after its initial publication, with chapters that were suppressed at that time.

Sinclair won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for his novel Dragon's Teeth (1942) about the Nazi takeover of Germany. It is the third of eleven novels in Sinclair's World's End series following globe-trotter Lanny Budd and his adventures of derring-do. In Dragon's Teeth he acts as secret agent, infiltrates Hitler's most intimate circle, and reports back to President Roosevelt. Sinclair caused much controversy and change in his lifetime, widely read in North and South America, Europe, and Russia. As Georg Brandes notes in his Introduction to Sinclair's King Coal (1917) " . . . . Sinclair is one of the not too many writers who have consecrated their lives to the agitation for social justice, and who have also enrolled their art in the service of a set purpose."

Upton Beall Sinclair was born on 20 September 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland, the only child of Priscilla Harden and Upton Beall Sinclair. His father struggled with various sales jobs, but his alcoholism got in the way of many of his ventures. It was a tumultuous childhood for young Upton. At the age of fourteen he enrolled in the City College of New York, writing dime novels and stories for magazines and newspapers to help pay for his tuition. It was here that he became acquainted with and embraced the Socialist Party's politics. Sinclair writes in his Introduction to The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903);

I do not know if "The Valley of the Shadow" means to you what it means to me; I do not know if it means anything at all to you. But I have sought long and far for these words, to utter an all but unutterable thought.

When you walk in the forest you do not count the lives that you tread into nothingness. When you rejoice with the springtime you do not hear the cries of the young things that are choked and beaten down and dying. When you watch the wild thing in your snare you do not know the meaning of the torn limbs, and the throbbing heart, and the awful silence of the creature trapped. When you go where the poor live, and see thin faces and hungry eyes and crouching limbs, you do not think of these things either.

But I, reader--I dwell in the Valley of the Shadow.

After graduating from Columbia University, the Socialist journal Appeal to Reason commissioned him to write about stockyard workers. Armed with a pen and camera he spent weeks researching; The Jungle was first serialised in Appeal to Reason in 1905. Readers avidly followed it, but publishers were wary of the explosive content. After a handful of rejections, Doubleday published it in 1906. Sinclair wrote many more novels and plays, but none reached the popularity that The Jungle did. Encouraged by its success, Sinclair founded a socialist commune in Englewood, New Jersey, but fire destroyed it a year later.

In the year 1900 Sinclair married Meta Fuller with whom he had a son, David (1901-2007), renowned research physicist. Meta left her husband in 1911 for poet Harry Kemp and she and Sinclair were soon divorced. In 1913 Sinclair married his second wife, author Mary Craig Kimborough (1883-1961). They moved to California and there both became actively involved in politics, organising the socialist reform movement End Poverty in California (EPIC). He ran for Democratic nominee for Governor of California in 1934 amidst roiling controversy. After a happy marriage of almost fifty years, Mary suffered a stroke and died in 1961. At the age of eighty-three, Sinclair was married a third time, to Mary Elizabeth Willis (1882-1967). Upton Sinclair died on 25 November 1968, and now rests in the Rock Creek Cemetery of Washington, District of Columbia, United States.

Other works by Upton Sinclair include:

Springtime and Harvest (1901), later republished as King Midas (1901),
Prince Hagen (play, 1903)
The Second-Story Man (play, 1903)
Manassas (1904)
A Captain of Industry (1906)
The Metropolis (1908)
The Moneychangers (1908)
Samuel the Seeker (1909)
Love's Pilgrimage (1911)
The Machine (play, 1911)
The Naturewoman (play, 1912)
Sylvia's Marriage (1914)
The Profits of Religion (1918)
Jimmie Higgins (1919)
100%: The Story of a Patriot (1920)
They Call Me Carpenter (1922)
Oil! (1927),
Roman Holiday (1931),
American Outpost (1932),
The Flivver King: A Story of Ford-America (1937),
The Return of Lanny Budd (1953), Sinclair's final novel in his World's End series, and
The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962).

Biography written by C. D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2007. All Rights Reserved.

The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission.

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Recent Forum Posts on Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair Must Reads--

As a reader I like to go through various author's works. I want to start on Upton Sinclair, but outside of The Jungle and Oil! I'm not sure which others to read. Suggestions? Thanks--

Posted By raider60 at Sun 20 Jul 2008, 11:27 PM in Sinclair, Upton || 4 Replies

Upton Sinclair's Oil! and the movie

The film There Will Be Blood is based upon this 1927 Upton Sinclair novel. It is in fact based very loosely, as these two stories are nearly as different as night and day. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this, since films and novels are very different forms of expression. It's perfectly legitimate to take the kernel of one story and turn it into something completely different. Still, it's interesting to look into the differences, and speculate on why the filmmaker made the changes he did. The film is the story of an evil man, lacking in humanity and motivated by greed. His name is Daniel Plainview; he has an adopted son, whom he uses as a kind of prop, a cute accessory when dealing with people in order to foster the illusion that he's a decent fellow. In Upton Sinclair's book, the character is named J.A. Ross (the name Plainview appears only once in the book, as an alias Ross uses in a telegram) and he is very fond of his boy. The novel is in fact written from the son's perspective, and it is the relationship between J.A. Ross and J.A. Ross Jr., (nicknamed "Bunny") that is the heart of the novel. There is a great deal of love in the relationship, tempered by an amicable difference of opinion, and ultimately rendered tragic by a fundamental difference in temperament. Bunny is "soft". His sympathies lie with the oil workers and their families, the poor landowners who are fooled into selling their lots to sharp developers, and with the small-time operators who inevitably fall by the wayside in the struggle with the big ones. Dad is a hard-headed business man, a successful oil operator who understands that deals must be made and palms greased in order to get the oil out of the ground. A man would be a fool to show his hand when he suspects there is oil under a rancher's property. If he doesn't grab up the pipe and timber he needs for wells straight away, his competitors will do so, and will freeze him out, so he offers the pipe or lumber dealer a percentage, off the books, to sweeten the deal. Ross can't wait around for the county to pave a road to his site; time is money, so he puts some of that money into the hands of the appropriate official, in order to get the job done. After all, the official earns but a pittance with his county salary, so think of it not as a bribe but as fair compensation for all the extra time and work he will have to put in. Dad is only doing what all the other oil men do, and he is by their standard unusually honest: he keeps his word and he's careful not to tell an outright lie. Bunny however is troubled by all this. As much as he loves his dad, he can't help but see these things as cheating, kickbacks, and bribery. He wonders at his father's motivations, which truly have nothing to do with greed; J.A. Ross Sr. cares little about money other than as something they'll need to get the next oil field into production. He is committed to the job at hand, which is to get oil out of the ground. America needs oil, that is reason enough for him. The father in turn wonders at this odd son of his, who can't help but look into things, and trouble himself over things that can't be changed. He keeps hoping his son will outgrow it, and keeps on loving him when he doesn't. They love each other right till the end, when Dad dies in European exile, chased out of his native California by threatened prosecution and Congressional inquiry, events that are clearly based on the actual Teapot Dome oil scandal. Besides his father, the other great attachment of Bunny's life is with his friend Paul Watkins, a labor activist, a Leftist so radicalized that he sympathizes with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Bunny is thus torn, trying to bridge a hopeless division between his intellectual and personal life. He is a millionaire's son who believes deeply in the cause of Socialism. This, then, is the crucial difference between the book and the movie. The movie is a tale of an evil man, a purely personal evil; if there is any cause whatsoever of this evil, it lies in his sinfulness, the sins of greed and ambition. The book on the other hand is a tale of the inevitable conflict between capital and labor, a social rather than a personal issue. There is evil present in Upton Sinclair's novel, but it isn't the oil-man's evil; to quote the final line of the book, there is "...an evil Power which roams the earth, crippling the bodies of men and women, and luring the nations to destruction by visions of unearned wealth, and the opportunity to enslave and exploit labor." Evil is, in short, the Capitalist system! Upton Sinclair was of course a Progressive reformer, a socialist, and-- intellectually at least-- a Marxist. I suspect Paul Thomas Anderson wasn't about to touch any of this with a ten foot pole. Much of it would seem archaic: early twentieth-century stuff of purely historical interest. (I myself found it of great historical interest... but then maybe I'm just weird!) I can't help but wonder, though, if it's quite right to take an author's work and turn it so completely on its head. Curiously, this is a turn of events that is anticipated within the novel itself, which treats of the film industry by way of Bunny's romance with a screen star named Vee Tracy. Bunny learns from close up the film business's propensity for taking socio-economic themes and turning them into the purely individual, in effect defusing them. Bunny is horrified to learn that Vee's movie, set during the Russian Revolution, centers on a love story between a beautiful noblewoman and a dashing American secret agent. I can only wonder what Sinclair would think about seeing his call for collective action transformed on the screen into a tale of individual morality. Anything so Left-radical as Oil! is surely unmarketable these days. "Capitalists" are now called "entrepreneurs", benevolent beings virtually above criticism. It's an interesting historical-cultural drift. In his day, Upton Sinclair was a popular author, and the Progressive agenda had a widespread appeal. Oil! is a polemical work, with a clear agenda. It is schematic at times, and a bit strident. It might be called dated, but on the other hand it is perhaps invaluable for offering a glimpse into the mindsets and opinions of what was a very different era, though an era less than a century past.

Posted By curlyqlink at Fri 11 Jul 2008, 9:11 AM in Sinclair, Upton || 1 Reply

The Jungle..

well, I am not sure what a new thread means... I just wanted to comment on The Jungle... not great literature, but compelling none the less... it will make a vegetarian of any reader... Upton Sinclair was evidently quite a man, very socially conscious, and political..

Posted By Turtlemother at Wed 2 Mar 2005, 3:00 AM in Sinclair, Upton || 2 Replies

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