Postbellum America, 1866-1913 |
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All American
Major Works
Family
Homes
Occupations
Chronology
1878: born
Sept. 20 in Baltimore, Maryland 1892:
attends College of the City of New York 1897: graduates
from College of the City of New York 1897-c. 1900: attends Columbia University; contributes puzzles,
stories, and other items to magazines and newspapers 1901: Springtime
and Harvest; marries Meta Fuller; son David born; moves to Thousand
Islands 1902:
returns to New York; introduced to socialism 1903: Prince
Hagen: A Fantasy 1904: Manassas; spends about 7 weeks in Chicago to
conduct research for The Jungle 1905: The Jungle appears serially in Appeal to Reason 1906: A
Captain of Industry; The Jungle; The Industrial Republic;
loses race for Congress 1907: father
die; fire destroys Helicon Hall 1907-1916: moves
and travels extensively 1908: The
Metropolis; The Moneychangers 1909: Good
Health and How We Won It 1910: Samuel
the Seeker 1911: The
Fasting Cure; Love’s Pilgrimage 1912:
divorced from Meta Fuller 1913:
marries Mary Craig Kimbrough; Sylvia 1914:
Sylvia’s Marriage; Damaged Goods 1914: spends
2 days in jail after demonstration in New York City 1916: moves
to Pasadena, California 1917: King
Coal 1918:
launches monthly magazine called Upton Sinclair’s; The Profits of
Religion 1920: The
Brass Check; loses race for Congress 1922: loses
race for Congress 1923: The
Goose-Step 1924: The
Goslings 1925: Mammonart 1926: loses
race for California governor 1927: Money
Writes!; Oil! 1928: Boston 1930: loses
race for California governor 1933: I,
Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty 1935: I,
Candidate for Governor—And How I Got Licked 1940: World’s
End launches 11-volume Lanny Budd series 1942: Dragon’s
Teeth 1943: wins
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Dragon’s Teeth 1968: dies Resources
Upton Sinclair:
American Rebel is a
biography of the novelist. Upton Sinclair: A
Study in Social Protest The Muckrakers:
Crusaders for American Liberalism Updated March 15, 2002
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Upton Sinclair, 1878-1968By Mark Canada
Like his contemporary Stephen Crane and his hero Percy Bysshe Shelley, novelist Upton Sinclair produced a literary masterpiece before he turned 30. Indeed, if he had followed Crane’s and Shelley’s lead and had died in his 20s, he still would be remembered for The Jungle, his lurid account of the deplorable living and working conditions of immigrants in Chicago. A sensation in its own time, The Jungle remains one of America’s best examples of a journalistic novel. Sinclair did survive his 20s—and indeed his 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and even 80s—and produced dozens of other books before his death at the age of 90. Some of these books, such as King Coal (1917) and Oil! (1927), resemble The Jungle in their treatment of economic and social issues. Sinclair’s interests ranged widely, however, and he also wrote about health, marriage, art, and religion. Even his best-known novel lacks the stylistic and thematic sophistication of other classics. Still, he proved in The Jungle that he could construct a gripping story, tell it in lively prose, and accurately capture real aspects of contemporary life in the form of a novel. Life
Born in Baltimore in 1878, Sinclair began attending the College of the City of New York when he was but 14 years old. After his graduation in 1897, he continued his education at Columbia University. Over the next three years, he not only studied, but also contributed puzzles, stories, and other items to magazines and newspapers. Unlike Crane and other American writers, Sinclair did no serious apprenticeship as a reporter, however. Instead, he wrote mostly fiction at first, publishing adventure stories for the Street and Smith company and then self-publishing his first novel, Springtime and Harvest, in 1901. In this same year, he married Meta Fuller, who later gave birth to a son, David. During this early part of his career, as Ronald Gottesman explains in his preface to The Jungle, Sinclair saw the writer as a kind of prophet and literature as a means of social reform. Reading works by Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, Gottesman writes, helped lead Sinclair to believe that “he had been chosen to be an artist-prophet who would help usher in a new dawn for mankind” (ix). A turning point his career came in 1902 when Sinclair was introduced to Socialism. This economic philosophy, which among other things calls for the uniting of workers, would shape both his life and his work for the next several years. Most notably, it left its stamp on The Jungle, which Sinclair initially published in serial form in a Socialist publication called Appeal to Reason in 1905. Although The Jungle was a sensation, even driving President Theodore Roosevelt to push the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act through Congress, Sinclair’s life after its publication does not resemble that of a comfortable literary celebrity. Between 1907, when his father died and a fire destroyed a community that Sinclair had begun, and 1916, when he took up regular residence in Pasadena, California, Sinclair wandered across the country, was divorced from Meta, married Mary Craig Kimbrough, and produced a number of forgotten books, including The Fasting Cure (1911) and Sylvia (1913). Although he would never match the success he had achieved with The Jungle, Sinclair did produce other novels of note. In 1917, he came out with King Coal, an account of Western miners, and in 1927 he published Oil!, which biographer William A. Bloodworth has suggested may be his best novel. In the 1940s, he launched an 11-volume series of historical novels that came to be known as the Lanny Budd Series. The series was a popular one, and Sinclair even garnered a Pulitzer Prize for one of its installments, Dragon’s Teeth (1943). Unlike some authors and journalists, who remain detached observers of the life they chronicle, Sinclair was active and an activist. In doing research for The Jungle, for example, he actually worked undercover in the meat-packing industry. Later, he went to jail for his role in a demonstration and even ran several times as a Socialist candidate for Congress and governor of California. In the 1930s, he joined the Democratic Party and won its primary for California governor before losing in the general election. Work
Somewhat of an anomaly in the history of American literature, Sinclair’s primary contribution as a novelist may be historical rather than literary. Bloodworth has called him “a novelist more concerned with content than form, a journalistic chronicler of his times rather than an enduring artist” (26). Still, his ability to combine journalism and fiction merits attention. In The Jungle, he created a piece of investigative journalism so compelling that it led directly to the passage of legislation. Although they also wrote powerful novels about social issues, neither Crane nor Theodore Dreiser can boast such success in actually bringing about prompt and concrete change. At the same time, Sinclair’s expose is a riveting piece of fiction that engaged and continues to engage thousands of readers. One secret to Sinclair’s success may lie in his ability to weave real, startling descriptions and statistics into his narrative in a relatively seamless way. In an early chapter of The Jungle, for example, he cleverly sketches the awesome statistics of the meat-packing industry through the guise of a tour that Jurgis and his fellow immigrants take through a plant. In his early novel Manasses, Gottesman writes, Sinclair demonstrates “certain features and techniques that would become over the years typical patterns and stock devices in his work,” including “a sometimes brilliantly realized rendering of surface detail, a skillful journalistic description of complex processes, and a lucid presentation of complicated issues” (xiii-xiv). Sinclair, furthermore, had a knack for writing crisp prose and describing life with striking imagery and imaginative figurative language. Still, his fiction suffers from shortcomings that keep it out of the realm of the great works of Crane, Henry James, and others. The Jungle, for instance, loses power in its closing chapters, when it almost abandons narrative and becomes a novel of ideas. Furthermore, it lacks thematic sophistication. In short, there is little startling in the novel beyond the details. Nevertheless, for writing one of America’s best journalistic novels, Upton Sinclair deserves to be remembered and studied. In The Jungle, Sinclair produced a striking example of how writers could package journalism in the form of fiction. In a tradition of American literary journalism that stretches from Benjamin Franklin to Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and beyond, Upton Sinclair’s novel stands as a major achievement. Works CitedBloodworth, William A. “Upton Sinclair.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Gottesman, Ronald. Introduction. The Jungle. New York: Penguin, 1985. vii-xxxii. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Penguin, 1985. |