Upton Sinclair was born on
September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland.
His family had once belonged to the southern aristocracy but, at
Sinclair’s birth, the family hovered near poverty. Sinclair graduated
from high school early and enrolled in the City College of New York at
the age of fourteen. When he was fifteen, he began writing
to support himself and help pay his college expenses. During his
college years, Sinclair encountered socialist philosophy, the influence
of which is evident in his writing throughout his life, and became
an avid supporter of the Socialist Party. After he graduated from
college, he enrolled in Columbia University as a graduate student
in 1897.
Sinclair published five novels between 1901 and 1906, but
none of them generated much income. Late in 1904, the
editors of the popular socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason sent
Sinclair to Chicago to examine the lives of stockyard workers. He
spent seven weeks in the city’s meatpacking plants, learning every
detail about the work itself, the home lives of workers, and the
structure of the business. The Jungle was born
from this research and was first published in serial form in Appeal
to Reason. The first few publishers whom Sinclair approached
told him that his novel was too shocking, and he financed a first
publication of the book himself. Eventually, however, Sinclair did
find a willing commercial publisher, and in 1906, The
Jungle was published in its entirety.
With the instant success of The Jungle, Sinclair
took his place in the ranks of the “muckrakers,” a term that Theodore
Roosevelt coined in 1906 to refer to a group
of journalists who devoted themselves to exposing the ills of industrialization. The
Jungle raised a public outcry against the unhealthy standards
in the meatpacking industry and provoked the passage of The Pure
Food and Drug Act of 1906. No novel since
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first
published in 1851, had made such a social
impact. The novel’s success satisfied Sinclair’s financial concerns
but not his political motivations for writing it. Sinclair had intended
the novel to elicit sympathy for the working class and build support
for the Socialist movement. His readership, however, was more moved
by the threat of tainted beef than the plight of the worker. Sinclair
tried to translate the success of The Jungle into
large-scale social change by building a utopian colony in New Jersey
with the profits from the novel, but the colony burned down four
months after its inception.
In 1911, Sinclair divorced his
first wife and married Mary Craig Kimbrough, a writer. They moved
to California, where Sinclair continued to write in support of socialism.
During the Great Depression, Sinclair organized the End Poverty
in California movement. In 1934, he ran as
a democrat in an unsuccessful campaign to become California’s governor.
During the 1940s, he returned to writing
fiction. He enjoyed a revival in popularity and won a Pulitzer Prize
for Dragon’s Teeth, a novel dealing with Nazism
in Germany.
Sinclair and his wife moved to a small town in Arizona
in the 1950s. After Kimbrough died in 1961, Sinclair
married again. His third wife died in 1967, and
Sinclair died in 1968. Though he published
more than eighty books after The Jungle, he is
most remembered for this novel. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union,
the Warsaw Pact, and the Berlin Wall, the novel’s idealistic glorification of
socialism may seem naïve, but the novel remains an important social
record of the psychology of American capitalism in the early twentieth
century.
