The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair
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Written at the age 83, Sinclair at last allows his loyal readership to glean an in-depth look at the man who discovered the Jungle in Armours Meat Industry at 28, founded a Utopian co-operative in 1908, and who muckraked through all of America “to become the finest and most devoted polemicist this country has seen”—from his childhood beginnings in Maryland to his youth in New York through to publication of his first novels and political career and beyond.
Of his work, Upton Sinclair says: “The English Queen Mary, who failed to hold the French port of Calais, said that when she died, the word ‘Calais’ would be found written on her heart. I don’t know whether anyone will care to examine my heart, but if they do they will find two words there—’Social Justice.’ For that is what I have believed in and fought for during sixty-three of my eighty-four books.
“His is an intellectual’s book dealing with one who made intellectual history, and no self-respecting intellectual tradesman will fail to read it.”—Kirkus Review
Illustrated with 17 black-and-white photographs.
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Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 - November 25, 1968) was an American writer of 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.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, the family moved to New York in 1888 and Sinclair went on to study law at Columbia University, but soon turned to writing and languages. He gained fame in 1906 for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle, which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
In 1919, he published The Brass Check, an 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, 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.”
Many of his novels are widely regarded to read like historical works. Writing during the Progressive Era, Sinclair describes the world of industrialized America from both the working man’s point of view and the industrialist. Novels like King Coal (1917), The Coal War (published posthumously), Oil! (1927) and The Flivver King (1937) describe the working conditions of the coal, oil and auto industries at the time.
Sinclair was an outspoken socialist and ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a nominee from the Socialist Party.
He died in 1968 at the age of 90.
