Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (Sept. 20, 1878 – Nov. 25, 1968) was a writer of novels of social protest and political tracts; he is best known for his 1906 expose of the meatpacking industry, "The Jungle."
Born in Baltimore, Md., Sinclair was named for his father, an amiable alcoholic who became a symbol for feckless failure in the eyes of his son. Sinclair's mother, Priscilla Harden, was by contrast Puritanical and strong-willed, qualities that Sinclair also embodied. Living in cheap apartments in New York from the age of 10, Sinclair had personal experience of poverty. But he was also an indulged only child who often visited his mother's wealthy relatives in Maryland. The contrast between wealth and poverty troubled him and became his major theme.
Sinclair was one of the best educated American writers of his era, graduating from what is now City University of New York at 18 and attending classes at Columbia College for two more years, but he condemned American education for failing to explain and rectify social problems associated with poverty. Hungry as a young shark, in his words, for money and fame, he began writing boys' stories at 16. At 20 he vowed to give up hack writing and become a serious novelist.
At 21 he married the 18-year-old Meta Fuller. Their son, David, was born the following year, in December 1901. Sinclair's several serious novels failed, and his marriage was in trouble when, in 1903, he turned to what he regarded as the secular religion of Socialism. In 1904 his Socialist contacts sent him to Chicago to write about the plight of meatpacking workers. The resulting novel, "The Jungle," aroused such great indignation — about bad meat, not about mistreated workers, as Sinclair had intended — that it helped secure passage of the country's first Pure Food and Drug laws.
Sinclair used his sudden wealth and fame to support several experiments in communitarian living. He also agitated for various reforms, all detailed in hastily written novels and nonfiction books and articles that did not live up to the promise of "The Jungle." His marriage collapsed in 1911, and in 1913 he married again, more happily, to Mary Craig Kimbrough. In 1916 they moved to Pasadena, Calif. In the productive 12 years that followed, Sinclair wrote nonfiction critiques of American education, religion, journalism, and literature. He also wrote more fiction, including the well-received "Oil!" in 1927 and "Boston," about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in 1928 (the film based on "Oil!," "There Will Be Blood," effectively captures the best part of the novel, the bringing in of the well).
 |
| Sinclair Lewis |
In 1934 Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat; he lost, but was said to have altered the state's rigid conservatism. Returning to writing, Sinclair reinvented himself as a historical novelist. "World's End," in 1940, would be the first of 11 "Lanny Budd" novels, in which Sinclair's young protagonist roams the world, meeting leaders both good (Roosevelt, Churchill) and evil (Hitler, Mussolini). By 1953, when the series ended, Sinclair had become a committed cold warrior, convinced that the Soviet Union for which he had once had high hopes was a tyranny worse than Hitler's.
A few more books would follow, but Sinclair spent most of his time caring for his ailing wife until her death in 1961. He married for the third time the following year to a lively widow who made the intensely private writer "put the 'social' in Socialism." He also reconciled with his son, David, from whom he had long been estranged; in 1967, the year before his death, he moved to a nursing home in Bound Brook, N.J., not far from his son's home.
 |
| Sinclair Lewis |
Sinclair's vast collection of letters and books is housed in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. It includes a famous photograph of the author, who was about 5 feet 7 inches, standing next to a stack of books he had written that is taller than he is: some 90 books in 90 years. Many of those works were admitted propaganda by a talented writer who had more interest in persuasion and politics than in human personality and are no longer read. One wag said he sold his birthright for a pot of message. But a few, including "The Jungle," parts of "Oil!," and "World's End," hold up well. Sinclair himself was that rarity in the literary world, a man of action as well as of ideas.