Upton Sinclair

His father sold liquor and drank it. The family moved constantly, Baltimore then New York, and the boy slept on sofas or crossways at the foot of his parents' bed, and in the bed beside his mother when his father stayed out. His mother's people were rich — one aunt had married a millionaire — and he stayed with them often enough to learn exactly what the difference looked like. He did not start school until he was 10. He entered the City College of New York five days before his 14th birthday and paid the tuition by grinding out jokes, dime novels and pulp fiction, up to 8,000 words a day dictated to stenographers. At 17 he had earned enough to move his parents into an apartment.

Reporting from inside the Chicago packinghouses in 1904 produced a novel that put the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act on the books within months and cut domestic and foreign purchases of American meat by half. Theodore Roosevelt called him hysterical, unbalanced and untruthful in a private letter, then signed the laws. Nearly 90 more books followed, along with a Pulitzer and a run for governor of California that his opponents beat with fabricated newsreels. BriefHistory carries that record in full. This page is about the man who assembled it.

He was a moralist about sex who held that it existed for reproduction, and he told his first wife that only the birth of a child gave a marriage dignity and meaning. He picked Meta Fuller's reading for her. When their abstinence method failed she tried repeatedly to end the pregnancy, and the son was born anyway. Sinclair meanwhile carried on an affair with Anna Noyes. Meta left him in 1911 for a poet he had invited to camp on their land, and he sailed to the Netherlands to have the marriage annulled on the ground of her adultery. His second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough, wrote the Southern girlhood that became the 1913 novel Sylvia and its sequel. Both went out under his name. In his 1962 autobiography he wrote that he had stolen them from her.

He died in a New Jersey nursing home on November 25, 1968, at 90, a year after his third wife, and lies beside her at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington. The 11 Lanny Budd novels — bestsellers in 21 countries, one a Pulitzer winner — went out of print and stayed out until ebook editions appeared in 2016. The Jungle never went out of print, and it is still assigned in American schools. In 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson took his 1927 novel Oil! and made There Will Be Blood from it, and the film drew eight Academy Award nominations. His line about a man's salary and his capacity to understand things is now quoted more than anything else he wrote.

Upton Sinclair's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Manassas book
  A Civil War novel, last of four books that sold badly before The Jungle 1904
• The Jungle book
  Serialized first in the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, from February 1905 1906
• Helicon Home Colony company
  A cooperative in Englewood, New Jersey, funded by the novel and open to white non-Jews only. It burned within a year. 1906
• The Brass Check book
  His attack on the American press, which he called the most dangerous book he ever wrote 1919
• Oil! book
  Boston's censors objected to one sex scene, so he sold a Fig Leaf Edition on the street 1927
• Dragon's Teeth book
  The third Lanny Budd novel. It took the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 1942

• September 15, 1892 aged 13 Enters the City College of New York at 13 Five days before his 14th birthday.
• October 18, 1900 aged 22 Marries Meta Fuller, after each had warned the other against it
• 1904 aged ~26 Goes into the Chicago packinghouses to report for Appeal to Reason
• 1906 aged ~28 The Jungle appears as a book and two federal food laws pass the same year He also ran for Congress in New Jersey and took three percent.
• August 1911 aged 32 Meta leaves him for the poet Harry Kemp An Amsterdam court annulled the marriage on May 24, 1912, on the ground of her adultery.
• 1913 aged ~35 Marries Mary Craig Kimbrough and publishes her girlhood as his novel Sylvia
• 1923 aged ~45 Arrested at San Pedro for reading the Bill of Rights aloud at a strike rally He founded the Southern California ACLU the same year.
• November 6, 1934 aged 56 Loses the California governorship to Frank Merriam 879,000 votes to 1,138,000. The Socialist Party expelled him for running as a Democrat.
• November 25, 1968 aged 90 Dies at a nursing home in Bound Brook, New Jersey, at 90

• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. read him and signed the laws
• Henry Ford 1863–1947
  Industrialist who revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line and made automobiles affordable. subject of The Flivver King
• Charlie Chaplin 1889–1977
  British-American actor and filmmaker whose Tramp character became an icon of the silent film era. recruited him to produce a film
• Sinclair Lewis 1885–1951
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose satirical novels critiqued American capitalism. wrote him into It Can't Happen Here
• Eugene V. Debs 1855–1926
  Socialist Party leader who ran for president five times from prison and championed labor rights. shared the Socialist Party