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Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (
September 20, 1878 –
November 25, 1968), was a prolific
American author and
muckraker who wrote over 90 books in many genres and was widely considered to be one of the best investigators advocating
socialist views and supporting
anarchist causes. He achieved considerable popularity in the first half of the
20th century. He gained particular fame for his 1906 novel
The Jungle, which dealt with conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and caused a public uproar that partly contributed to the passage of the
Pure Food and Drug Act and the
Meat Inspection Act in 1906.
He was born in
Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism shadowed his son's childhood. In
1888, the Sinclair family moved to
New York City.
Sinclair married his first wife, Meta Fuller, in
1900.
An early success was the
Civil War novel
Manassas, written in
1903 and published a year later. Originally projected as the opening book of a trilogy, the success of
The Jungle caused him to drop his plans, although he did revise
Manassas decades later by "moderating some of the exuberance of the earlier version".
The Jungle brought to light many major issues in America, such as
poverty.
Sinclair created a socialist
commune, named
Helicon Hall Colony, in 1906 with proceeds from his novel
The Jungle. One of those who joined was the novelist and playwright
Sinclair Lewis, who worked there as a janitor.
Sinclair made several bids for office. His first was in
1906. The
Socialist Party of America sponsored his candidacy for Congress in
New Jersey. He lost with just over 3% of the votes.
The colony burned down in
1907, apparently from arson. After the famed fire of Helicon Hall, he moved to
Arden, Delaware, where many
Georgist, Socialist, and Communist "Free Thinkers" lived, including
Mother Bloor's son Hamilton "Buzz" Ware. Some say that he worked in a tree house behind his home during these years.
Around
1911, Sinclair's wife ran off with the poet Harry Kemp (later known as the Dunes Poet of Provincetown, Massachusetts). Within a few years, Sinclair moved to
Pasadena, California, where he founded the state's chapter of the
American Civil Liberties Union in the
1920s. Sinclair went on to run unsuccessfully for Congress twice on the Socialist ticket: in
1920, for the
United States House of Representatives, and in
1922, for the Senate.
Sinclair's
1928 book,
Boston, created controversy by proclaiming the innocence of
Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists who were accused of a murder/robbery in that city. Sinclair faced what he would later call "the most difficult ethical problem of my life," when he was told in confidence by
Sacco and Vanzetti's former attorney,
Fred Moore, that they were guilty and how their alibis were supposedly arranged. However, in the letter revealing that discussion with Moore, Sinclair also wrote, "I had heard that Moore was using drugs. I knew that he had parted from the defense committee after the bitterest of quarrels... Moore admitted to me that the men themselves, had never admitted their guilt to him." Although the two men were ultimately executed, this episode has been used by some to claim that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty and that Sinclair knew that when he wrote his novel. However, this account has been disputed by Sinclair biographer Greg Mitchell.
In
1934, Sinclair made his most successful run for office, this time as a
Democrat. Sinclair's platform for the California gubernatorial race of
1934, known as
EPIC (End Poverty in California), galvanized the support of the Democratic Party, and Sinclair gained its nomination.
Conservatives in California were themselves galvanized by this, as they saw it as an attempted communist takeover of their state. They used massive
political propaganda portraying Sinclair as a Communist, even as he was being portrayed by American and
Soviet communists as a
capitalist. Robert A. Heinlein, the science fiction author, was deeply involved in Sinclair's campaign, a point which Heinlein tried to obscure from later biographies, as Heinlein tried to keep his personal politics separate from his public image as an author.
Sinclair was defeated by
Frank F. Merriam in the election, and largely abandoned EPIC and politics to return to writing. However, the race of 1934 would become known as the first race to use modern campaign techniques like
motion pictures.
Of his gubernatorial bids, Sinclair remarked in
1951: "The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to 'End Poverty in California' I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them."
Aside from his political and social writings, Sinclair took an interest in
psychic phenomena and experimented with
telepathy, writing a book titled "
Mental Radio", published in
1930. According to Sinclair, a 34-pound table was once levitated eight feet over his head by a young psychic in a
seance.
After Sinclair's first wife left, he married Mary Craig Kimbrough (1883 - 1961), a woman who was later tested for
psychic abilities. After her death, Sinclair married a third time, to Mary Elizabeth Willis (1882 - 1967). Late in life, he moved from California to
Buckeye, Arizona, and then to
Bound Brook, New Jersey. Sinclair died in 1968, and is buried in
Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC, next to his third wife, who died a year before him.
The
Upton Sinclair House in
Monrovia, California, is now a
National Historic Landmark.
The papers, photographs, and first editions of most of his books are found at the Lilly Library at
Indiana University in
Bloomington, Indiana.
