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Upton Sinclair was an activist writer whose works, including 'The Jungle' and 'Boston,' often uncovered social injustices.
Synopsis
Upton Sinclair was born in Maryland in 1878. His involvement with socialism led to a writing assignment about the plight of workers in the meatpacking industry, eventually resulting in the best-selling novel The Jungle (1906). Although many of his later works and bids for political office were unsuccessful, Sinclair earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for Dragon's Teeth. He died in New Jersey in 1968.
Between Two Worlds
Upton Sinclair was born in a small row house in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878. From birth he was exposed to dichotomies that would have a profound effect on his young mind and greatly influence his thinking later in life. The only child of an alcoholic liquor salesman and a puritanical, strong-willed mother, he was raised on the edge of poverty, but was also exposed to the privileges of the upper class through visits with his mother’s wealthy family.
When Sinclair was 10 years old, his father moved the family from Baltimore to New York City. By this time, Sinclair had already begun to develop a keen intellect and was a voracious reader, consuming the works of Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley at every waking moment. At age 14, he attended the City College of New York and started selling children’s stories and humor pieces to magazines. After graduating in 1897, he enrolled at Columbia University to continue his studies and, using a pseudonym, wrote dime novels to support himself.
Synopsis
Upton Sinclair was born in Maryland in 1878. His involvement with socialism led to a writing assignment about the plight of workers in the meatpacking industry, eventually resulting in the best-selling novel The Jungle (1906). Although many of his later works and bids for political office were unsuccessful, Sinclair earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for Dragon's Teeth. He died in New Jersey in 1968.
Between Two Worlds
Upton Sinclair was born in a small row house in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878. From birth he was exposed to dichotomies that would have a profound effect on his young mind and greatly influence his thinking later in life. The only child of an alcoholic liquor salesman and a puritanical, strong-willed mother, he was raised on the edge of poverty, but was also exposed to the privileges of the upper class through visits with his mother’s wealthy family.
When Sinclair was 10 years old, his father moved the family from Baltimore to New York City. By this time, Sinclair had already begun to develop a keen intellect and was a voracious reader, consuming the works of Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley at every waking moment. At age 14, he attended the City College of New York and started selling children’s stories and humor pieces to magazines. After graduating in 1897, he enrolled at Columbia University to continue his studies and, using a pseudonym, wrote dime novels to support himself.
Upton Sinclair
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Upton Sinclair: An Extraordinary American Life - Biography, Quotes, Books
Upton Sinclair imagined himself a poet and dedicated his time to writing poetry. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400061512/ref=as_li_tl?ie...
Good evening my friend Maj Marty Hogan and thank you for reminding us that September 20 is the anniversary of the birth of activist American writer Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. who wrote to highlight social injustices in the early 20th century. I read his The Jungle while I was a cadet at West Point.
Rest in peace Upton Beall Sinclair Jr.!
Background from archive.nytimes.com/nytimes.com/ref/timestopics/topics_uptonsinclair.html
"Upton Sinclair By ANTHONY ARTHUR
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (Sept. 20, 1878 – Nov. 25, 1968) was a writer of novels of social protest and political tracts; he is best known for his 1906 expose of the meatpacking industry, "The Jungle."
Born in Baltimore, Md., Sinclair was named for his father, an amiable alcoholic who became a symbol for feckless failure in the eyes of his son. Sinclair's mother, Priscilla Harden, was by contrast Puritanical and strong-willed, qualities that Sinclair also embodied. Living in cheap apartments in New York from the age of 10, Sinclair had personal experience of poverty. But he was also an indulged only child who often visited his mother's wealthy relatives in Maryland. The contrast between wealth and poverty troubled him and became his major theme.
Sinclair was one of the best educated American writers of his era, graduating from what is now City University of New York at 18 and attending classes at Columbia College for two more years, but he condemned American education for failing to explain and rectify social problems associated with poverty. Hungry as a young shark, in his words, for money and fame, he began writing boys' stories at 16. At 20 he vowed to give up hack writing and become a serious novelist.
At 21 he married the 18-year-old Meta Fuller. Their son, David, was born the following year, in December 1901. Sinclair's several serious novels failed, and his marriage was in trouble when, in 1903, he turned to what he regarded as the secular religion of Socialism. In 1904 his Socialist contacts sent him to Chicago to write about the plight of meatpacking workers. The resulting novel, "The Jungle," aroused such great indignation — about bad meat, not about mistreated workers, as Sinclair had intended — that it helped secure passage of the country's first Pure Food and Drug laws.
Sinclair used his sudden wealth and fame to support several experiments in communitarian living. He also agitated for various reforms, all detailed in hastily written novels and nonfiction books and articles that did not live up to the promise of "The Jungle." His marriage collapsed in 1911, and in 1913 he married again, more happily, to Mary Craig Kimbrough. In 1916 they moved to Pasadena, Calif. In the productive 12 years that followed, Sinclair wrote nonfiction critiques of American education, religion, journalism, and literature. He also wrote more fiction, including the well-received "Oil!" in 1927 and "Boston," about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in 1928 (the film based on "Oil!," "There Will Be Blood," effectively captures the best part of the novel, the bringing in of the well).
In 1934 Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat; he lost, but was said to have altered the state's rigid conservatism. Returning to writing, Sinclair reinvented himself as a historical novelist. "World's End," in 1940, would be the first of 11 "Lanny Budd" novels, in which Sinclair's young protagonist roams the world, meeting leaders both good (Roosevelt, Churchill) and evil (Hitler, Mussolini). By 1953, when the series ended, Sinclair had become a committed cold warrior, convinced that the Soviet Union for which he had once had high hopes was a tyranny worse than Hitler's.
A few more books would follow, but Sinclair spent most of his time caring for his ailing wife until her death in 1961. He married for the third time the following year to a lively widow who made the intensely private writer "put the 'social' in Socialism." He also reconciled with his son, David, from whom he had long been estranged; in 1967, the year before his death, he moved to a nursing home in Bound Brook, N.J., not far from his son's home.
Sinclair's vast collection of letters and books is housed in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. It includes a famous photograph of the author, who was about 5 feet 7 inches, standing next to a stack of books he had written that is taller than he is: some 90 books in 90 years. Many of those works were admitted propaganda by a talented writer who had more interest in persuasion and politics than in human personality and are no longer read. One wag said he sold his birthright for a pot of message. But a few, including "The Jungle," parts of "Oil!," and "World's End," hold up well. Sinclair himself was that rarity in the literary world, a man of action as well as of ideas."
Upton Sinclair: An Extraordinary American Life - Biography, Quotes, Books
https://youtu.be/-3ho7HITYwM?t=18s
FYI Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Seid Waddell Capt Tom Brown 1stSgt Eugene Harless CW5 John M. MSG Andrew White SSG James J. Palmer IV aka "JP4"SCPO Morris Ramsey SGT Michael Thorin SGT (Join to see) SGT Robert George SGT John " Mac " McConnell SP5 Mark Kuzinski SP5 Robert Ruck SPC Margaret Higgins Maj Marty Hogan SSgt Brian Brakke Sgt Arthur Caesar SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL
Rest in peace Upton Beall Sinclair Jr.!
Background from archive.nytimes.com/nytimes.com/ref/timestopics/topics_uptonsinclair.html
"Upton Sinclair By ANTHONY ARTHUR
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (Sept. 20, 1878 – Nov. 25, 1968) was a writer of novels of social protest and political tracts; he is best known for his 1906 expose of the meatpacking industry, "The Jungle."
Born in Baltimore, Md., Sinclair was named for his father, an amiable alcoholic who became a symbol for feckless failure in the eyes of his son. Sinclair's mother, Priscilla Harden, was by contrast Puritanical and strong-willed, qualities that Sinclair also embodied. Living in cheap apartments in New York from the age of 10, Sinclair had personal experience of poverty. But he was also an indulged only child who often visited his mother's wealthy relatives in Maryland. The contrast between wealth and poverty troubled him and became his major theme.
Sinclair was one of the best educated American writers of his era, graduating from what is now City University of New York at 18 and attending classes at Columbia College for two more years, but he condemned American education for failing to explain and rectify social problems associated with poverty. Hungry as a young shark, in his words, for money and fame, he began writing boys' stories at 16. At 20 he vowed to give up hack writing and become a serious novelist.
At 21 he married the 18-year-old Meta Fuller. Their son, David, was born the following year, in December 1901. Sinclair's several serious novels failed, and his marriage was in trouble when, in 1903, he turned to what he regarded as the secular religion of Socialism. In 1904 his Socialist contacts sent him to Chicago to write about the plight of meatpacking workers. The resulting novel, "The Jungle," aroused such great indignation — about bad meat, not about mistreated workers, as Sinclair had intended — that it helped secure passage of the country's first Pure Food and Drug laws.
Sinclair used his sudden wealth and fame to support several experiments in communitarian living. He also agitated for various reforms, all detailed in hastily written novels and nonfiction books and articles that did not live up to the promise of "The Jungle." His marriage collapsed in 1911, and in 1913 he married again, more happily, to Mary Craig Kimbrough. In 1916 they moved to Pasadena, Calif. In the productive 12 years that followed, Sinclair wrote nonfiction critiques of American education, religion, journalism, and literature. He also wrote more fiction, including the well-received "Oil!" in 1927 and "Boston," about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in 1928 (the film based on "Oil!," "There Will Be Blood," effectively captures the best part of the novel, the bringing in of the well).
In 1934 Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat; he lost, but was said to have altered the state's rigid conservatism. Returning to writing, Sinclair reinvented himself as a historical novelist. "World's End," in 1940, would be the first of 11 "Lanny Budd" novels, in which Sinclair's young protagonist roams the world, meeting leaders both good (Roosevelt, Churchill) and evil (Hitler, Mussolini). By 1953, when the series ended, Sinclair had become a committed cold warrior, convinced that the Soviet Union for which he had once had high hopes was a tyranny worse than Hitler's.
A few more books would follow, but Sinclair spent most of his time caring for his ailing wife until her death in 1961. He married for the third time the following year to a lively widow who made the intensely private writer "put the 'social' in Socialism." He also reconciled with his son, David, from whom he had long been estranged; in 1967, the year before his death, he moved to a nursing home in Bound Brook, N.J., not far from his son's home.
Sinclair's vast collection of letters and books is housed in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. It includes a famous photograph of the author, who was about 5 feet 7 inches, standing next to a stack of books he had written that is taller than he is: some 90 books in 90 years. Many of those works were admitted propaganda by a talented writer who had more interest in persuasion and politics than in human personality and are no longer read. One wag said he sold his birthright for a pot of message. But a few, including "The Jungle," parts of "Oil!," and "World's End," hold up well. Sinclair himself was that rarity in the literary world, a man of action as well as of ideas."
Upton Sinclair: An Extraordinary American Life - Biography, Quotes, Books
https://youtu.be/-3ho7HITYwM?t=18s
FYI Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Seid Waddell Capt Tom Brown 1stSgt Eugene Harless CW5 John M. MSG Andrew White SSG James J. Palmer IV aka "JP4"SCPO Morris Ramsey SGT Michael Thorin SGT (Join to see) SGT Robert George SGT John " Mac " McConnell SP5 Mark Kuzinski SP5 Robert Ruck SPC Margaret Higgins Maj Marty Hogan SSgt Brian Brakke Sgt Arthur Caesar SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL
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CPT Gurinder (Gene) Rana
Great Share of an Extraordinary Author, who was inspired by poverty and riches; by the social in socialism. Thanks.
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LTC Stephen F.
You are very welcome CPT Gurinder (Gene) Rana For historical-themed posts I generally try to find a reasonable source of information to share.
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