“I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

—Upton Sinclair

 

 

Upton Sinclair, an inspiration to many, winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and a critic, was born in 1878 in the state of Maryland. Mr. Sinclair wrote many books earning lots of respect like Dragon’s Teeth (which he won the Pulitzer Prize for) and The Jungle, exposing the meatpacking industry. He died at age 90 in New Jersey.

Early Years

On the 20th of September, in 1878, Upton Beale Sinclair was born in a small house in Baltimore, Maryland. From a very early age he walked into the world of dichotomies, which would change him forever. His mother, a strong, strict woman with a sense of justice and his dad, an alcoholic who sold liquor, couldn’t be more dissimilar. Have you ever known two people who were complete opposites but you like them just the same? That’s how Upton Sinclair felt – it molded his thinking and affected his perspective. Adding to this, he had no siblings and had a wealthy family on his mother’s side and not a lot of money on his father’s side. Despite his hogwashy father, he was very highbrow because of his many visits to his mother’s family house. Though the wealth on his mother’s side was nice, he still loved his father just the same and developed a bitterness towards the rich and a sympathy for the poor.

In 1888, (when Upton was 10) his family moved to The Big Apple. By then Upton Sinclair loved reading, trying to use every second he got reading Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley. When Upton was 14, he went to the City College of New York, which is really young to go to a college, and started writing pieces of work, selling kids’ and comedy pieces to magazines. In 1897, when he finished City College, he went to Columbia University to continue learning, disguised as someone else and using his fake name, a pseudonym, he wrote stories to make some money.

A Writing Career Begins

When he finished his education at age 20, Upton decided to become a freelance journalist.  Then in 1900, he started a family with Meta Fuller, and had a son named David the very next year. David was sunshine to his family. Even though it was a rough and unhappy marriage, it did inspire Upton to write his first novel, Spring Time and Harvest, a romance, in 1901, which even though getting rejected multiple times, Upton decided to publish himself. Over the next couple of years, he wrote more books of different kinds, including autobiographies, histories of the Civil War, and profiles about Wall Street, but sadly all of them were failures.

The Muckraker’s First Big Hit

When Upton figured out how people were mistreated in the meatpacking industry he was enraged – his face turning red, with little bubbles of spit coming out of his mouth and smoke coming out of his ears. So, he tried to expose the industry, because he didn’t believe in classism and people being divided between the few wealthy and many poor. He went to Chicago to learn about the mistreated workers and wrote for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. After conducting undercover research for a few weeks on his assignment, Upton wrote his second novel, The Jungle. Even though he got rejected several times, in 1906, The Jungle was finally released and surprised and shocked everybody. The Jungle depicted cruelty to animals and the dangerous and unsanitary conditions in Chicago meatpacking plants; adding another stacking block to the change of laws on food production, the novel helped people realize that the unsanitary conditions and cruelty to animals was bad, which caused an uproar and changed the way people shopped.

When The Jungle was released, Upton asked his friend named Jack London to help him publicize it. It became a bestseller, jumping off the shelves in every bookstore, and was translated into 17 languages. One of the readers was President Theodore Roosevelt who invited Upton to the White House and ordered an inspection of the meatpacking industry. As a result, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were both passed in 1906.

From Pork to Prizes

Fame and fortune did not stop Sinclair who persisted and continued to work for his political beliefs. Soon he built a utopian building called Helicon Hall, using the money he got from The Jungle. Sadly, it burned down and Upton thought that he was being targeted because of his political beliefs.

Over the next 10 years, he wrote many books including The Metropolis in 1908 and King Coal,

exposing the poor working conditions for the coal mining industry during the 1910s. Industries, you better watch out, Upton is out to get you! This was published in 1917 and then The Goose-Step, a critique on American education, was published in 1923. Even though his ideas were genius, many people thought he was either boring or insane – his legacy and literary importance was unbeknownst to people because Upton was on the next level of ideas.

 

Then in the early 1920s, Sinclair divorced Meta and decided to remarry a woman named Mary Kimbrough and moved to Southern California. And not making any changes to his career, he continued his political pursuits. He became a candidate for the Socialist Party and took bids to Congress without success. Unfortunately, the books that he was writing were doing better than the political bids. He wrote Oil! in 1927, which is about the Teapot Dome scandal, and in 1928, Boston, which is about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were anarchists convicted of murder and then electrocuted for their crimes, which caused a great outcry, for the punishment was capital, only justifiable by the prosecutor stressing their anarchic roots. After 80 years Oil! would be adapted into an Academy Award-winning film, There Will Be Blood.

 

 

During the Great Depression, Upton Sinclair worked harder at his political activities. He helped organize EPIC, which stood for the End Poverty in California Movement, to help him win the Governorship of California. Even though there were huge parties that Upton had to worry about, like the Democratic Party, he was beaten by a small party, getting up 37 percent of the vote. He reacted to the devastating blow by writing I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked. A few years later Upton wrote a book about the war, about the Nazis and Hitler, earning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the next year.

Later Years
Upton continued his work and career but by around 1960s he turned his focus to his wife who was in poor health condition and passed away in 1961. Then in 1963 he married again at age 83, to Mary Willis. A few years later his own health got his attention and he was moved to a nursing home and died on November 25, 1968, at the age of 90. He wrote more than 90 books, 30 plays and even more works of journalism.