Upton Sinclair

He married for the second time in 1913. He had a long and happy married life with Mary Craig Kimbrough till her death in 1961.

He wed again after his second wife’s death. His third wife was Mary Elizabeth Willis.

Sinclair was born in Maryland to an alcoholic father and a strictly religious mother. He had a difficult childhood. He had to deal with his father’s alcoholism on the one hand, and his mother’s extreme strictness on the other.

His father did not have a regular job and the family was poor. However, his maternal grandparents, with whom he sometimes stayed, were very rich. He became aware of the inequalities between the rich and the poor at an early age.

The young Upton loved reading from a young age, and would read whatever books he could get his hands on. This habit helped him gain a deeper understanding of the world around him.

He joined the City College of New York in 1892 when he was just 14 and graduated in 1897.

He entered Columbia University to study law. There he learnt several languages like Spanish, German and French. He paid his college tuition fees by writing jokes, stories and articles for magazines.

Writing was his true passion, and he wrote four novels in quick succession after leaving Columbia. King Midas (1901), Prince Hagen (1902) and Manassas (1904) received favorable reviews though they did not do well commercially.

In 1902, he developed acquaintance with several members of the Socialist Party of America like Leonard Abbott, George Davis Herron, and Gaylord Wilshire. He was advised to read the works of Karl Marx, Frank Norris, Jack London and Thorstein Veblen, which he did and became a committed socialist.

He was asked by the editor of the socialist journal, ‘Appeal to Reason’ to write a novel on the immigrant workers in the Chicago meat industry. Sinclair worked undercover for seven weeks in 1904 in the meatpacking plants to research for the novel.

‘The Jungle’ was published in 1906. The book exposed the difficult working conditions, absence of employee welfare, and unethical practices in the American meatpacking industry. The novel became a bestseller, and even influenced the then President Theodore Roosevelt’s government to look into the malpractices prevalent in the meatpacking industry. The Pure Food and Drugs Act, and the Meat Inspection Act were passed in 1906.

Using the proceeds from ‘The Jungle’, he founded a socialist community, Helicon Home Colony in Englewood in 1906. The community was, however, burned down in 1907.

His first major work was the 1906 novel ‘The Jungle’. It was based on the American meatpacking industry and became a bestseller and forced the government to pass legislations to regulate the meatpacking industry.

One of the books in the Lanny Budd series, ‘Dragon’s Teeth’ dealt with the life of a socialist during the period of Nazi occupation of Germany. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize - the only major literary award won by the author.