upton sinclair short biography

Upton Sinclair

(1878-1968)

Who Was Upton Sinclair?

Upton Sinclair was an American writer whose involvement with socialism led to a writing assignment about the plight of workers in the meatpacking industry, eventually resulting in the best-selling novel The Jungle (1906). Although many of his later works and bids for political office were unsuccessful, Sinclair earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for Dragon's Teeth .

Sinclair was born in a small row house in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878. From birth, he was exposed to dichotomies that would have a profound effect on his young mind and greatly influence his thinking later in life. The only child of an alcoholic liquor salesman and a puritanical, strong-willed mother, he was raised on the edge of poverty but was also exposed to the privileges of the upper class through visits with his mother’s wealthy family.

When Sinclair was 10 years old, his father moved the family from Baltimore to New York City. By this time, Sinclair had already begun to develop a keen intellect and was a voracious reader, consuming the works of Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley at every waking moment. At age 14, he attended the City College of New York and started selling children’s stories and humor pieces to magazines. After graduating in 1897, he enrolled at Columbia University to continue his studies and, using a pseudonym, wrote dime novels to support himself.

Upton Sinclair Books

Having completed his schooling at age 20, Sinclair made the decision to become a serious novelist while working as a freelance journalist to make ends meet. In 1900, he also began a family, marrying Meta Fuller, with whom he would have a son, David, the following year.

Though their marriage would ultimately prove to be an unhappy one, it did inspire Sinclair’s first novel, Springtime and Harvest (1901), which, after receiving numerous rejections, Sinclair published himself. Over the next few years, he would write several more novels—based on topics ranging from Wall Street to the Civil War to autobiography—but all were more or less failures.

'The Jungle'

Ultimately, it would be Sinclair’s political convictions that would lead to his first literary success and the one for which he is most known. The contempt he had developed for the upper class as a youth had led Sinclair to socialism in 1903, and in 1904 he was sent to Chicago by the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason to write an exposé on the mistreatment of workers in the meatpacking industry. After spending several weeks conducting undercover research on his subject matter, Sinclair threw himself into the manuscript that would become The Jungle .

Initially rejected by publishers, in 1906 the novel was finally released by Doubleday to great public acclaim—and shock. Despite Sinclair’s intention to reveal the plight of laborers at the meatpacking plants, his vivid descriptions of the cruelty to animals and unsanitary conditions there caused a great public outcry and ultimately changed the way people shopped for food.

Upon its release, Sinclair enlisted his fellow writer and friend Jack London to help publicize his book and assist in getting his message across to the masses. The Jungle became a massive bestseller and was translated into 17 languages within months of its release. Among its readers was President Theodore Roosevelt , who—despite his aversion to Sinclair’s politics—invited Sinclair 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 Politics to Pulitzer

Fame and fortune would not derail Sinclair from his political convictions; in fact, they only served to deepen them and enable him to embark on personal projects such as Helicon Hall, a utopian co-op he constructed in New Jersey in 1906 with royalties received from The Jungle . The building burned down less than a year later, and Sinclair was forced to abandon his plans, suspecting that he had been targeted because of his socialist politics.

Sinclair published numerous works over the following decade, including the novels The Metropolis (1908) and King Coal (1917), and the education critique The Goose-Step (1923) . But the author’s persistent focus on ideology often did little to help sales, and most of his fiction during this period was commercially unsuccessful.

By the early 1920s, Sinclair had divorced Meta, remarried a woman named Mary Kimbrough and moved to Southern California, where he continued both his literary and political pursuits. He founded the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and as a candidate for the Socialist Party, he launched unsuccessful bids for Congress. His novels from this period fared far better than his political ventures, with 1927’s Oil! (about the Teapot Dome scandal) and 1928’s Boston (about the Sacco and Vanzetti case) both receiving favorable reviews. Eighty years after it appeared in print, Oil! would be made into the Academy Award-winning film There Will Be Blood.

With the onset of the Great Depression , Sinclair intensified his political activities. He organized the End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement, a public-works program that was the basis for his 1934 run as the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor of California. Despite vehement opposition from the political establishment, both within the Democratic Party and beyond, Sinclair was defeated by a relatively small margin, taking 37 percent of the vote in a three-candidate race. He celebrated his loss by publishing a work titled I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked in 1935 .

In 1940, Sinclair published the historical novel World’s End. It was first of what would be 11 books in the “Lanny Budd” series, named for the protagonist who somehow manages to be present at all of the most significant world events in the early 20th century. The 1942 installment in the series, Dragon’s Teeth , which explores the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Germany, earned Sinclair the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year.

Later Years and Death

Sinclair continued his tireless and prolific output into the second half of the century, but by the early 1960s, he had turned his attention to Mary, who was in poor health following a stroke. She passed away in 1961, and two years later, at age 83, Sinclair married for a third time, to Mary Willis.

Several years later, his own health caused him to move to a nursing home in Bound Brook, New Jersey. He died on November 25, 1968, at the age of 90, having written more than 90 books, 30 plays and countless other works of journalism.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Upton Sinclair
• Birth Year: 1878
• Birth date: September 20, 1878
• Birth State: Maryland
• Birth City: Baltimore
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Upton Sinclair was an activist writer whose works, including 'The Jungle' and 'Boston,' often uncovered social injustices.
• Business and Industry
• Civil Rights
• Fiction and Poetry
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Virgo
• College of the City of New York
• Columbia University
• Death Year: 1968
• Death date: November 25, 1968
• Death State: New Jersey
• Death City: Bound Brook
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Upton Sinclair Biography
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• Last Updated: April 20, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• [With 'The Jungle'] I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
• All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
• To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat- and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going.

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• World Biography

Upton Sinclair Biography

Born: September 20, 1878 Baltimore, Maryland Died: November 25, 1968 Bound Brook, New Jersey American writer

Upton Sinclair, American novelist and political writer, was one of the most important muckrakers (writers who search out and reveal improper conduct in politics and business) of the 1900s. His novel The Jungle helped improve working conditions in the meat-packing industry.

Early life and education

Upton Beale Sinclair Jr. was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878. He was the only child of Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden. His father worked at different times selling liquor, hats, and men's clothes. He also struggled with poverty and a drinking problem. Young Upton was a shy, thoughtful boy who taught himself to read at age five. The family moved to New York City when Upton was ten, and at fourteen he entered New York City College. He graduated in 1897 and went to Columbia University to study law, but instead became more interested in politics and literature. He never earned a law degree. Through these years he supported himself by writing for adventure-story magazines. While attending Columbia he wrote eight thousand words a day. He also continued to read a great deal—over one two-week Christmas break he read all of William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) works as well as all of John Milton's (1608–1674) poetry.

Becomes involved in politics

Sinclair moved to Quebec, Canada, in 1900. That same year he married Meta Fuller, with whom he had a son. His first novel, Springtime and Harvest (1901), was a modest success. Three more novels in the next four years failed to provide even a bare living. Sinclair became a member of the Socialist Party in 1902, and he was a Socialist candidate for Congress from New Jersey in 1906. (Socialists believe in a system in which there is no private property and all people own the means of production, such as factories and farms, as a group.)

Also in 1906 Sinclair's The Jungle, a novel exposing unfair labor practices and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing factories of Chicago, Illinois, was a huge success. Sinclair had spent seven weeks observing the operations of a meat-packing plant before writing the book. The Jungle 's protest about the problems of laborers and the socialist solutions it proposed caused a public outcry. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) invited Sinclair to discuss packing-house conditions, and a congressional investigation led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.

Documents personal life

Sinclair divorced his first wife in 1913. The autobiographical (based on his own life) novel Love's Pilgrimage (1911) treats his marriage and the birth of his child with an honesty that shocked some reviewers. Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough in 1913. Sylvia and Sylvia's Marriage, a massive two-part story, called for sexual enlightenment (freedom from ignorance and misinformation).

King Coal (1917), based on a coal strike of 1914 and 1915, returned to labor protest and socialistic comment. However, in 1917 Sinclair left the Socialist Party to support President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924). He returned to the socialist camp when Wilson supported intervention in the Soviet Union. In California Sinclair ran on the Socialist ticket for Congress (1920), for the Senate (1922), and for governor (1926 and 1930).

Continues stirring things up

Sinclair continued his writings on political and reform issues. Oil! (1927) dealt with dishonesty in President Warren G. Harding's (1865–1923) administration. Boston (1928), a novel about the Sacco-Vanzetti case (in which two Italian men, believed by many to have been innocent, were convicted and executed for having committed a murder during a payroll robbery), brought to light much new material and demonstrated the constructive research that always lay beneath Sinclair's protest writings.

In 1933 Sinclair was persuaded to campaign seriously for governor of California. He called his program "End Poverty in California." His sensible presentation of Socialist ideas won him the Democratic nomination, but millions of dollars and a campaign based on lies and fear defeated him in the election.

World's End (1940) launched Sinclair's eleven-volume novel series that attempted to give an insider's view of the U.S. government between 1913 and 1949. One of the novels, Dragon's Teeth (1942), a study of the rise of Nazism (a German political movement of the 1930s whose followers scorned democracy and favored the destruction of all "inferior" non-Germans, especially Jewish people), won the Pulitzer Prize. Before his death on November 25, 1968, Sinclair had produced more than ninety books that earned at least $1 million, most of it contributed to socialist and reform causes.

For More Information

Harris, Leon A. Upton Sinclair, American Rebel. New York: Crowell, 1975.

Scott, Ivan. Upton Sinclair: The Forgotten Socialist. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996.

Sinclair, Upton. Autobiography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1962.

Sinclair, Upton. My Lifetime in Letters. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1960.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Upton Sinclair

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Upton Sinclair by Nicolas S. Witschi LAST REVIEWED: 21 January 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 21 January 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0025

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr., (b. 1878–d. 1968) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a family of meager means that still had historical ties to Southern gentility. Driven by a fervent idealism, Sinclair nurtured his childhood encounters with both hardship and refinement into a compulsion to make the world a better place through literature. He undertook the researching and writing of his best-known book, The Jungle , at the urging of an editor for the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason who had read Manassas , Sinclair’s attempt to dramatize the moral consequences of slavery. An instant bestseller on a truly global scale, The Jungle offered a harrowing condemnation of the meat industry’s treatment of its workers. It made Sinclair’s reputation, and it had an almost immediate political effect. President Theodore Roosevelt used its popularity to push through passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, a dramatic food safety reform law, even as he derisively lumped its author with the journalist “muckrakers” he generally detested. Sinclair’s subsequent works did not have the same impact as The Jungle , though he would never tire of railing against the inequities that structured American life. Indeed, the usually affable Sinclair became a serious thorn in the sides of the coal and petroleum industries, Hollywood, organized religion, the auto industry, and the realms of finance and journalism, among many others. On several occasions he sought the governorship of his adopted home state of California, and his surprise winning of the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1934 race radically changed the party, invigorating it out of its early New Deal indolence. Moreover, the mass media machine that the Republican Party and its allies in Hollywood marshaled to discredit and defeat him greatly changed how film and eventually television would factor in electoral politics. Dismissed as a writer who seemed to prefer content over form, Sinclair was nevertheless a vital influence on the culture of his day. In his preface to Boston , his 1928 novel about the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, Sinclair wrote of trying to craft a “contemporary historical novel.” In many respects, this phrase describes his strength as a literary artist, for it identifies a form evident in everything from The Jungle and Oil! to the immensely popular Lanny Budd series of his later years. Many readers know Upton Sinclair for his food industry exposé; much of the remaining canon of roughly ninety books and scores of pamphlets, essays, and manifestos certainly merits closer attention as well.

These books and book chapters offer brief glimpses into a far-from-brief career. Typically they look at a select few novels and seek to establish Sinclair’s significance within literary history, particularly as it relates to social reform movements. Beginning with Dell 1969 , which was first published during Sinclair’s life, a number of useful books have attempted to provide generally contextualizing and interpretive lenses on the career as a whole. Bloodworth 1977 is still quite useful for its career-based approach and fair assessments of literary merit, while Yoder 1975 is still one of the more reliable assessments of Sinclair’s development as a socialist thinker and writer, though Van Wienen 2012 (cited under Contexts ) should also be consulted. Whittemore 1993 further analyzes Sinclair’s idealism and iconoclasm, focusing primarily on his early career and his connections to several other compelling literary artists of his day. Grenier 1983 offers an engaging discussion of Sinclair in the context of Progressive-era journalistic attempts to effect change at the political level. Kongshaug 2000 frames Sinclair’s aesthetic efforts as attempts to connect his idealistic uses of history with writerly approaches that would be more appealing to a wide audience than straightforward historical narrative might be.

Bloodworth, William A. Upton Sinclair . Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Traces Sinclair’s writings in the context of his biography, from early youthful works through his last writings in the 1960s. Limns Sinclair as a writer deeply engaged with the political effects of his work. Also useful for analyzing how Sinclair’s idealism often clashed with prevailing social forces during his lifetime.

Dell, Floyd. Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest . New York: Folcroft, 1969.

Written by a friend of Sinclair’s at his behest and first published in 1927, this mini-biography was intended as an account of Sinclair’s international fame and a response to requests for biographical information. While the volume laid out Sinclair’s life and ideas for readers of the day, it remains useful for today’s readers.

Grenier, Judson A. “Muckraking the Muckrakers: Upton Sinclair and His Peers.” In Reform and Reformers in the Progressive Era . Edited by David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta, 71–92. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983.

A mix of personal reminiscence, interviews with Sinclair, and historical scholarship. Places Sinclair within the context of fellow Progressive writers. Mostly emphasizes the journalistic qualities and contexts of his work.

Kongshaug, Erik. “Upton Sinclair.” In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies: Supplement V. Russell Banks to Charles Wright . Edited by Jay Parini, 275–293. New York: Scribner, 2000.

A succinct and useful account of a literary life, with specific attention to Sinclair’s attempts to use self-publication, aggressive self-promotion, and activist pamphleteering to bring his art to a mass audience.

Whittemore, Reed. Six Literary Lives: The Shared Impiety of Adams, London, Sinclair, Williams, Dos Passos, and Tate . Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993.

Depicts Sinclair as representative of a group of American writers who defined the contradictions of the twentieth century. Focuses on Sinclair’s early career, making frequent connections to his friend and colleague Jack London.

Yoder, Jon A. Upton Sinclair . New York: Ungar, 1975.

Traces Sinclair’s socialism through the representative texts of his career, seeking to establish the grounds upon which he may be recognized as more than a hack who “wrote widely without writing anything worth remembering” (p. 4).

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Upton Sinclair Biography

Author Profile

Sinclair started writing while a student at the City College of New York, which he entered at the age of fifteen. His early novels include Springtime and Harvest (1902, retitled King Midas ); Prince Hagen (1903); The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903); Manassas (1904); and A Captain of Industry (1906). He is best known, however, for The Jungle (1906), a brutally graphic exposé of Chicago’s stockyards that led to the strengthening of federal food adulteration laws. True to his socialist beliefs, Sinclair invested the profits from this, his most successful book, in the Helicon Home Colony, a cooperative community in Englewood, New Jersey. Other early books included The Metropolis (1908); The Money-changers (1908); and the semi-autobiographical Love’s Pilgrimage (1911). In 1915 Sinclair moved to California, where he wrote such books as King Coal (1917); They Call Me Carpenter (1922); Oil! (1927); and Boston (1928), which addressed the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, robbery and murder suspects who many believe were executed because of their anarchist beliefs.

When the first publisher of Oil! asked Sinclair to delete sections describing the extramarital affairs of one of his characters, Sinclair suggested a compromise: On pages from which objectionable passages were removed, large fig leaves were printed to suggest to readers what they were missing.

During the Depression Sinclair took an active role in California politics. In 1934 he formed EPIC (End Poverty in California), an alliance of progressives and the unemployed that took control of the state Democratic Party and nearly won him the governorship. After several other unsuccessful tries for public office, Sinclair returned to literary work in 1940 with the first of eleven novels tracing the career of a character named Lanny Budd from World War I to the Cold War. The third of these novels, Dragon’s Teeth (1942), won a Pulitzer Prize.

Bibliography

Bloodworth, William A. Upton Sinclair . Boston: Twayne, 1977. This short, sympathetic, yet balanced literary biography examines Sinclair’s place in American literary radicalism and the writer as social activist. Includes a bibliography.

Colburn, David R., and George E. Pozzetta, eds. Reform and Reformers in the Progressive Era . Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Examines Sinclair’s position as a muckraker and his role in inspiring Progressive reforms. Unlike other journalistic writers, Sinclair was personally and ideologically committed.

Dell, Floyd. Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest . New York: AMS Press, 1970. Dell’s treatment of Sinclair’s career analyzes the apparent discrepancy between his literary position in the United States and throughout the rest of the world. Personal incidents and psychological insights are intertwined with evaluations and interpretations of specific works. Contains a bibliography of out-of-print books and an index.

Harris, Leon. Upton Sinclair: American Rebel . New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975. Traces Sinclair’s rise from obscurity to fame, with his subsequent decline in popularity. The text provides interesting information regarding source materials for some of his novels. A section of photographs, extensive notes, a list of Sinclair’s books, and an index complete the book.

Herms, Dieter, ed. Upton Sinclair: Literature and Social Reform . New York: Peter Lang, 1990. This is a collection of papers from the Upton Sinclair World Conference of July, 1988, at the University of Bremen. Includes bibliographical references.

Mitchell, Greg. The Campaign of the Century . New York: Random House, 1992. At 665 pages, this excellently researched book details Sinclair’s 1934 gubernatorial campaign from August to November, stressing the media’s key role in defeating Sinclair and ushering in a new era of media politics. Includes notes.

Mookerjee, R. N. Art for Social Justice: The Major Novels of Upton Sinclair . Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988. Mookerjee, a critic of writers of the 1930’s, provides a...

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Biography: upton sinclair.

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books and other works across a number of genres. Sinclair’s work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckrakingnovel, The Jungle , which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Actand the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check , a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check , the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him “a man with every gift except humor and silence.” He is remembered for writing the famous line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Sinclair was an outspoken socialist and ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a nominee from the Socialist Party. He was also the Democratic Party candidate for Governor of California during the Great Depression, but was defeated in the 1934 elections.

His novel based on the meatpacking industry in Chicago, The Jungle, was first published in serial form in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, from February 25, 1905 to November 4, 1905. It was published as a book by Doubleday in 1906.

Sinclair had spent about six months investigating the Chicago meatpacking industry for Appeal to Reason , work which inspired his novel. He intended to “set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit.” The novel featured Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who works in a meat factory in Chicago, his teenage wife Ona Lukoszaite, and their extended family. Sinclair portrays their mistreatment by Rudkus’ employers and the wealthier elements of society. His descriptions of the unsanitary and inhumane conditions that workers suffered served to shock and galvanize readers. Jack London called Sinclair’s book “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.” Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half.

Sinclair wrote in Cosmopolitan Magazine in October 1906 about The Jungle : “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”The novel brought public lobbying for Congressional legislation and government regulation of the industry, including passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. At the time, President Theodore Roosevelt characterized Sinclair as a “crackpot”,   writing to William Allen White, “I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth.” After reading The Jungle, Roosevelt agreed with some of Sinclair’s conclusions but was opposed to legislation that he considered “socialist.” He said, “Radical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist.”

View Upton Sinclair’s full biography on Wikipedia .

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• Constitutional Rights Foundation - Upton Sinclairs The Jungle: Muckraking the Meat-Packing Industry
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• The Jungle - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
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The Jungle , novel by Upton Sinclair , published serially in 1905 and as a single-volume book in 1906. The most famous, influential, and enduring of all muckraking novels, The Jungle was an exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards . Because of the public response, the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, and conditions in American slaughterhouses were improved.

The main plot of The Jungle follows Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, who came to the United States in the hope of living the American dream, and his extended family , which includes Ona, Jurgis’s wife; Elzbieta, Ona’s stepmother; Elzbieta’s six children; Marija, Ona’s cousin; and Dede Rudkus, Jurgis’s father. They all live in a small town named Packingtown in Chicago. The title of Sinclair’s novel describes the savage nature of Packingtown. Jurgis and his family, hoping for opportunity, are instead thrown into a chaotic world that requires them to constantly struggle in order to survive. Packingtown is an urban jungle: savage, unforgiving, and unrelenting.

After being scammed into renting a barely livable house, they get to work. As winter comes, the conditions at each of their places of work become even more dangerous. Dede dies. Jurgis responds to these terrible working conditions by joining a labour union . His membership reveals to him the corruption deeply embedded in the factory system , which prompts him to take English classes in the hopes of promotion. Ona gives birth to a boy who is named Antanas, and she is forced to return to work just a week later. After suffering a sprained ankle from a work-related accident, Jurgis is bedridden for three months without pay; this lack of income puts a massive strain on his family. During this time, one of Elzbieta’s children dies of food poisoning . Jurgis, finally recovered, tries to find work, but, after three months of being sedentary , he has lost some of his strength, causing all the factories to deny him work. Eventually he gets a job at a fertilizer plant—the worst possible job, because the chemicals used there kill most workers after a few years. Jurgis takes to alcohol.

Ona is pregnant for a second time and, after returning home late one night from work, is revealed to have been raped by her boss, Phil Connor. Jurgis finds and attacks Connor and then is jailed for a month. Jurgis meets Jack Duane, who is a criminal; the two become friends. When Jurgis is released from prison, he finds that his family has been evicted from their house. When he finds them, he discovers Ona prematurely in labour. Both she and the child die. Jurgis, defeated, goes on a drinking binge. Invoking Antanas’s needs, Elzbieta finally convinces Jurgis to find another job. A wealthy woman takes interest in the family and provides Jurgis with a job at a steel mill. Jurgis feels renewed hope; he has dedicated himself entirely to Antanas. However, Jurgis’s life is shattered once again when he arrives home to find Antanas drowned in a mud puddle outside their house.

Jurgis abandons the rest of the family and wanders the countryside for a while, returning to Chicago the next winter to live on his own. He finds a job digging freight tunnels, where he soon injures himself. When he recovers, he is unable to find a job and is forced to beg on the streets. He gets hold of a hundred-dollar bill after spending a night with a wealthy man named Freddie Jones. However, when he attempts to change out the hundred for smaller bills at a bar, the bartender swindles him. Jurgis attacks the bartender and lands back in jail, where he is reunited with Jack Duane. Upon release, the men commit a number of burglaries and muggings as partners. Mike Scully, a corrupt politician, eventually hires Jurgis to cross picket lines as a scab . He makes a substantial amount of money doing this.

Jurgis encounters Phil Connor again and, in a fit of rage, attacks him. Jurgis is once again sent to prison. When he is released, he has no money and survives on charity. He finds Marija, who has become a prostitute in order to support Elzbieta and her remaining children. Marija has become addicted to morphine . Jurgis is eager to find a job before he goes to see Elzbieta. One night Jurgis wanders into a socialist political rally, where he is transformed. The novel ends with a hopeful chant of revolt: “Chicago will be ours.”

The Jungle was written at a time when the United States was in the throes of industrialization . Working-class immigrants to the United States had limited employment choices outside of factory jobs with often terrible working conditions. Sinclair wanted to expose these conditions to the wider American public, hoping that an appeal to readers’ emotions might spark change. He was given a $500 advance in 1904 by the socialist magazine Appeal to Reason to begin his project. The results were published serially until 1906, when Doubleday published The Jungle as a novel. To do research, Sinclair had gone undercover for seven weeks inside various Chicago meatpacking plants. The novel, while containing an abundance of true events, is fictional. Jurgis Rudkus and his family are not real people. Rather, their story is an amalgamation of stories Sinclair was exposed to. He utilized the fictional immigrant family as a vehicle for nonfictional anecdotes .

When The Jungle was published, its readers were outraged—but not in the way Sinclair had hoped. Their primary concern was food quality rather than the dangerous labour practices and cruel treatment of animals that Sinclair sought to expose. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” he said. Using the public’s reaction to the novel, U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt pushed Congress to pass both the Pure Food and Drug Act, which ensured that meatpacking plants processed their products in a sanitary manner, and the Meat Inspection Act , which required that the U.S. Department of Agriculture inspect all livestock before slaughter . The Jungle was also soon translated into dozens of languages.

Biography of Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. His alcoholic father sold liquor, and the family did not have much money while Sinclair was growing up. However, his grandparents were wealthy, and because Sinclair spent much of his childhood with them, he had an early vision of the disparities between rich and poor in nineteenth-century America. Sinclair would later remark that these disparities planted the early seeds of his views on social activism. Sinclair attended the City College of New York at the age of fourteen and first began publishing stories and articles to earn a living. He married Meta Fuller in 1900. Their relationship was often tumultuous, and she left Sinclair for another writer a decade after their marriage. Sinclair would marry two other times.

Sinclair began his major literary career by writing The Jungle , published in 1906. To write the novel, Sinclair went undercover in Chicago's meatpacking district. While there, he would meet many of the immigrant laborers that became the basis for the novel's characters. Sinclair originally published the novel as a serial in a popular socialist periodical. When Sinclair attempted to publish the work on a larger scale, several publishers at first rejected it because of its political leanings and its graphic depictions of violence. Sinclair self-published the novel before a major publisher finally picked it up, and the novel became a national sensation.

Though Sinclair had hoped the novel would be the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the socialist movement in America, its most notable contribution was alarming the public to the horrors of meat manufacturing. The novel attracted the attention of political leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, and was directly responsible for the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

With the success of his novel, Sinclair attempted to start a socialist utopian commune named Helicon Hall. He founded the colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and attempted to provide refuge for artists from the harsh city life of New York. However, one of the main buildings burned down, causing financial ruin for the endeavor. Many believe that the colony was intentionally burned because the members could not sustain it.

In the 1920s, Sinclair moved to California, where he became involved in politics. He unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice and, in 1934, campaigned for the state governor's office on the platform of ending poverty in California. Sinclair received help in his efforts due to massive migration to California by poor Midwestern farmers attempting to escape the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the depressed economy. Although Sinclair ultimately lost the election, he garnered almost a million votes, one of the best showings for a socialist candidate in American political history.

Sinclair wrote novels, short stories, and political literature for the rest of his career, although his best known and most popular work remained The Jungle . He became involved in Hollywood later in his career and helped write and direct several films. He died in New Jersey and was buried in Washington D.C.

Study Guides on Works by Upton Sinclair

The jungle upton sinclair.

The Jungle was published in 1906, three years after Upton Sinclair’s failed first novel, and it became an immediate success. Sinclair based the novel on the American meatpacking industry, an industry that had received scrutiny in the decade before...

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10 Things You Should Know About Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Upton Sinclair conceived The Jungle as a political game-changer, a book that would get people talking and instigate major reforms. The book certainly did both of those things—but for reasons that its author didn’t quite expect. Grab a barf bag and join us as we take a fresh look at Sinclair’s gut-wrenching magnum opus.

1. The Jungle was commissioned by a socialist newspaper editor.

Upton Sinclair, who was born in 1878, began his literary career as a teenager . While enrolled at the City College of New York, the future Pulitzer Prize-winner supported himself by writing jokes and short stories for assorted newspapers. Sinclair’s first novel—a romance titled Springtime and Harvest —was released in 1901. His politics veered leftward with age, and by 1903, he had become a socialist.

One year later, Sinclair established himself as a regular contributor to Appeal to Reason , America’s leading socialist newspaper. Its editor, Fred D. Warren, admired Sinclair’s fourth novel, Manassas , a historical epic set in the Civil War that was written as a salute to the abolitionist movement. In 1904, Warren gave Sinclair a $500 advance (the equivalent of about $14,000 in today’s dollars) to pen a similar novel about the problem of “wage slavery” in industrialized cities. Sinclair accepted the challenge, made tracks for the Chicago stockyards, and got to work.

2. Upton Sinclair did seven weeks’ worth of research on location.

Right from the get-go, Sinclair believed that The Jungle was destined to change history—and said as much when he met journalist Ernest Poole as he was starting his field research. “I’ve come here to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labor movement,” the 26-year-old author told Poole.

Sinclair spent a total of seven weeks taking field notes in and around Chicago’s meatpacking district. To access local factories, he contacted Windy City socialists and union leaders, many of whom were familiar with his work in Appeal to Reason . In the 1975 book Upton Sinclair, American Rebel , biographer Leon Harris wrote that the men “took him into their homes and all over the slaughterhouses, where he proved he was a superb reporter.” Disguised in well-worn clothes, Sinclair blended right in. On top of checking out the stockyards, he also took a few peeks into Chicago’s big banks and the famous Jane Addams Hull House .

3. Five publishers rejected The Jungle .

In exchange for his $500 advance, Warren secured the right to publish The Jungle as a serial in Appeal to Reason , where it ran in (mostly) weekly installments from February to November 1905. Sinclair concurrently tried to get a shortened version published in book form—but it proved challenging. At first, Macmillan offered to put it out, but only if Sinclair made some huge changes to the text. Though the company gave him another $500 advance to implement the tweaks, the two parties never saw eye-to-eye and Macmillan eventually decided against publishing The Jungle . (Luckily for the cash-strapped Sinclair, they never asked him to return the money.)

Afterward, four other publishers turned down the book. Just as Sinclair was printing The Jungle himself, the publisher Doubleday, Page finally made him an offer on it. Their edition was released in 1906. (Sinclair also released his self-published version, called the “Sustainer’s Edition,” which was funded by donations. It was nearly identical to Doubleday’s version.)

Calling the book a bestseller feels like an understatement. Doubleday, Page sold 25,000 copies in six weeks—and in one day managed to move 5500. In the blink of an eye, The Jungle ’s author had become a household name. “Not since [the British poet Lord Byron published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ] has there been such an example of worldwide celebrity won in a day by a book as has come to Upton Sinclair,” reported the New York Evening World .

4. Upton Sinclair never liked the ending of The Jungle.

For the most part, The Jungle takes a “show, don’t tell” narrative approach. The story centers on Jurgis Rudkus, a luckless, Lithuanian immigrant who immigrates to America with his family. We spend most of the novel following his trials and tribulations across the stockyards, saloons, and prisons of Chicago. And yet, during the book’s final chapter, he basically fades into the background. Jurgis ends up in the employ of a kindly socialist who converts him to the cause; he then attends a socialist dinner party, where he passively listens to armchair intellectuals debate the movement’s finer points. The novel ends with some welcome news about increased Socialist vote totals in elections around the country.

Critics panned the ending, which was seen as preachy and patronizing. Sinclair later admitted in his autobiography that “The last chapters were not up to standard.” When the time came to write the novel’s final third, he found himself distracted by marital difficulties and political commitments. Sinclair had also managed to waste Macmillan’s $500 advance, which put him in a tight spot and thwarted his plans to revisit Chicago on a second fact-finding trip.

Desperate to wrap up his story on a satisfactory note, Sinclair explored every option he could think of. At one point, he approached Macmillan with a proposal to split the book into two volumes, with the first installment ending after the death of Ona—Jurgis’s wife—in Chapter 19. Sinclair hoped that this would buy him more time to cook up a conclusion for The Jungle , but Macmillan nixed the whole two-volume idea. So, with some help from Warren, Sinclair sat down and gave the novel its underwhelming finale. Five years later, an embittered Sinclair told one correspondent, “Think of my having had to ruin The Jungle with an ending so pitifully inadequate.”

5. The Jungle got Upton Sinclair invited to the White House.

It didn’t take long for The Jungle to trigger a massive public outcry. Readers were sickened by the book’s revolting asides about the unsanitary conditions at meatpacking factories, which had huge consequences for America’s food industry—according to one packer who testified before Congress, sales of U.S. meats went down by 50 percent after Sinclair’s book was published in 1906. (For the record, though, this statement is unprovable because national statistics on meat consumption did not yet exist.)

Multiple copies of the novel were sent to President Theodore Roosevelt , who also received hundreds of letters from angry citizens demanding that his administration regulate slaughterhouses more thoroughly. In response, the president asked Sinclair to come and visit him at the White House. On April 4, 1906, the author arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where he met up with Roosevelt in the study. The president informed Sinclair that although a team of investigators from the Agriculture Department had already been sent to Chicago to verify The Jungle ’s claims, he was dissatisfied with their conclusions and was forming a second team.

6. The Jungle provoked an avalanche of legislation on Capitol Hill.

By the end of 1906, Congress had passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. The former mandated—among other things—that packing factories comply with new sanitation standards while also allowing the USDA to inspect all livestock animals before and after they were slaughtered. Meanwhile, the Pure Food and Drug Act banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or misbranded or poisonous or deleterious foods, drugs, medicines, and liquors.”

Both were vigorously backed by Roosevelt, whose second team of investigators was able to confirm most of what Sinclair had written in his novel. Given this, and the degree to which it had shaped public opinion, historians credit The Jungle with helping to push the acts forward.

7. One of The Jungle ’s most repulsive insinuations is (probably) baseless.

Roosevelt’s men found that Sinclair’s assessment of the workplace environment at American slaughterhouses was uncomfortably spot-on. As their 1906 report concluded, “The whole situation as we saw it in these huge establishments tends necessarily and inevitably to the moral degradation of thousands of workers who are forced to spend their working hours under conditions that are entirely unnecessary and unpardonable, and which are a constant menace not only to their own health, but to the health of those who use the food products prepared by them.”

In short, Sinclair did his homework. According to biographer Anthony Arthur, every claim in The Jungle , with “one notable exception,” has been backed up by “corroborating evidence or some sort of assurance that it was [at least] close to being true.” The lone outlier he noted was Sinclair’s suggestion that a few workers at lard factories may have fallen into vats and been converted into lard themselves. “[When] they were fished out,” Sinclair writes, “there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!” Arresting as this image is, it’s never been verified .

8. Upton Sinclair believed that most readers took the wrong lessons from The Jungle .

The Jungle is the rare activist novel that measurably changed our world. And yet, the effect it had on society was far removed from the author’s intentions. Remember, Sinclair set out to write an expose about the systemic exploitation of working-class people in industrialized cities. But instead, the public chose to fixate on his gruesome food-related anecdotes. In the process, most readers completely ignored Sinclair’s social pleas. As the author famously said in hindsight , “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

9. Proceeds from The Jungle were used to start a “utopian community.”

Ultimately, The Jungle made Sinclair $30,000 richer . He bought Helicon Hall, an abandoned boy’s school in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1906. The Helicon Home Colony was “open to any white person of good moral character,” according to its application. There were roughly 40 adult residents—live-in artists, writers, and intellectuals—as well as around 15 children who were to be raised by members of the community. Originally, the group was also going to divide up all of its cooking and housekeeping-related jobs between its own members and a group of college interns (one of whom was a young Sinclair Lewis, future Nobel Prize-winning author of Arrowsmith). After a while, however, those menial tasks were handed off to paid servants. A fire burned down Helicon Hall in 1907, putting an end to Sinclair’s strange communal experiment.

10. A silent film version of The Jungle came out in 1914.

Produced by the All-Star Feature Corporation, this silent movie premiered in New York City on June 1, 1914. Unlike the novel, it had little impact on the general public—thanks partly to the meat industry, which used its influence to keep The Jungle far away from most urban theaters. The cast was reasonably well known, but there was one surprising actor: Upton Sinclair himself . In the film, Sinclair played Eugene Debs (or possibly a character inspired by Debs), a socialist icon who ran for president five times during the early 20th century. Unfortunately, his performance has been lost to the sands of time. No known copies of this movie exist, and it’s believed that the last print disappeared at some point in the 1930s.

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Upton Sinclair, American Original

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Biography and Autobiography

November 24, 2014 by magscanner

Upton Sinclair wrote more than eighty books, and among them were a couple of autobiographical works. In addition, he was profiled in such volumes as American Outpost , and did occasional self-explanatory pieces for major and minor newspapers and periodicals. We presume he was paid for the work.

A couple of our external links are of that nature.

Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (1878 - 1968) was an American author who wrote close to one hundred novels in a variety of genres, including "muckraking" works (digging up and publishing scandalous information about famous people), most notably The Jungle (1906) which exposed grave labor and sanitary violations in Chicago's meat packing industry. A few months after it was published, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act.

As an outspoken socialist, Sinclair attempted unsuccessfully to bridge his literary success into the political arena. He lost a Congressional election as the Socialist Party candidate, and also his bid as the Democratic Party candidate for Governor of California during the Great Depression, during which he promoted the "End Poverty in California" campaign. Sinclair's legacy is promoting social justice and public policy changes as a direct result of his published works. You may also be interested in another leading muckracker and pioneer of investigative journalism, Ida Tarbell .

Sinclair was passionate about health and nutrition, advocated fasting and embraced a raw foods diet. His book, The Fasting Cure was a best seller, published in 1911.