Sinclair, Upton (1878–1968), muckraking author, social activist.Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1897, briefly attended graduate school at Columbia, and joined the
Socialist party in 1902. In 1905, with the novelist Jack London, he helped found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. A brief trip to
Chicago led to the novel on which his reputation largely rests,
The Jungle (1906), an exposé of the meatpacking industry widely credited with having inspired passage of the
Pure Food and Drug Act. Unlike most other
muckrakers, Sinclair was a book writer, not a journalist; a tireless advocate of radical causes and self‐promoter, he ultimately produced more than one hundred books. He wrote vegetarian and temperance tracts; investigative novels on the petroleum industry and the
Sacco and Vanzetti case; and nonfiction attacks on organized religion, the universities, and the press. He rarely received the critical respect he craved, but some of his books proved popular, and most caused a stir. At one time he was, in the estimation of H.L.
Mencken, the most widely translated American author.
Sinclair ran for office several times, most spectacularly in 1934 when his End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement won him that state's gubernatorial nomination. A well‐financed hostile advertising campaign against him, including radio, billboards, and film, and involving techniques that would later become staples of political campaigning, contributed to his loss that November. Sinclair retired from politics thereafter but continued to write, producing a series of novels featuring the dashing globetrotter Lanny Budd, one of which won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1943.
See also
Meatpacking and Meat Processing Industry;
New Deal Era, The;
Progressive Era;
Socialism;
Temperance and Prohibition.
Bibliography
Leon Harris , Upton Sinclair: American Rebel, 1975.
Greg Mitchell , The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics, 1992.
Greg Mitchell
