Upton Sinclair

American · 1878 to 1968

Born Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, to a liquor salesman whose alcoholism would shadow his son's childhood and a strict Episcopalian mother who disliked tea, coffee, and her husband's bottle, he slept sideways across his parents' bed because the family could not afford his own. His mother's family was wealthy; the gap between her relations' silver-service Baltimore and his father's rented furniture made him a socialist before he could read Marx. He entered the City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday and paid his way by writing dime novels and jokes for the boys' weeklies. To research The Jungle (1906), commissioned by the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, he spent seven weeks undercover in the Chicago meatpacking yards taking notes on floors awash with offal. The novel was meant as a tract for the immigrant worker; it was read as a warning about the food supply. President Theodore Roosevelt summoned him to the White House and signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act within months. He said: I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach. He poured the royalties into the failed utopian community of Helicon Hall, ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a socialist and for the California governorship in 1934 as an End Poverty in California Democrat, and wrote nearly a hundred more books. Dragon's Teeth (1942), the third of his eleven-volume Lanny Budd cycle, won the Pulitzer Prize. He died in a nursing home in Bound Brook, New Jersey, on November 25, 1968, at ninety.