Upton Sinclair House

Upton Sinclair was born on September 28, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, the scion of aristocratic forebears, although his immediate family was in straitened circumstances. Sinclair’s father, a liquor salesman, was an alcoholic, and consequently the family fortunes were subject to violent fluctuations. To this familial instability has been attributed, in part, Sinclair’s later proletarian sympathies. In 1888, the Sinclairs moved to New York, where Upton finished grammar school in two years and began attending the City College of New York at the age of fourteen. With characteristic energy and intensity, Sinclair wrote hack stories for pulp magazines as a student, and after the age of fifteen was able to support himself in this manner. He later worked his way through Columbia University. 

By 1900, Sinclair had sickened of the cheap sensationalism that kept him solvent, and he moved to the countryside near Princeton to do some serious writing. He married Meta Fuller that same year. The next six years were spent in grinding poverty, and the struggle to survive in an indifferent world while maintaining his literary integrity radicalized Sinclair. The influence of Wilshire’s Magazine, and his contact with the Socialist clergyman, George Herron, made of Sinclair an apostle of socialism, which as one critic observed, he embraced with religious fervor. Manassas, Sinclair’s first major novel, was a treatment of the Civil War from that perspective. 

In 1906, two years after Manassas was published, Sinclair received an assignment from a Socialist magazine, Appeal to Reason, to study and develop a report on the Chicago stockyards. From this experience came Sinclair’s most famous work, The Jungle, the story of a Lithuanian immigrant family destroyed by the exploitation of the economic system. It chronicled in lurid detail the practices of the meatpacking industry and was an immediate popular success, although the public showed more concern with corrupted meat than with the plight of the worker. Nonetheless, the novel enriched SInclair, brought him national fame, and led to the first Food and Drug Act.  

From the Jungle, Sinclair began writing a series of ideologically orientated exposés of American life, starting in 1918 with the book, The Profits of Religion. During this period, Sinclair also wrote The Brass Check (1919), which dealt with the press; The Goosestep (1923) and The Goslings (1924), which discussed education; and Mammonart (1925) and Money Writes (1927), which concerned the arts. Sinclair’s next best-known work, Oil! (1927), is a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the milieu and values of the Harding Era and is considered one of his most well-written works in terms of character development and plot complexity. 

By other avenues also, Sinclair pursued his idealistic aims for society. Between 1920 and 1930, he was a Socialist candidate for Congress and for Governor of California. Under the Democratic banner, he ran for governor again in 1936 on the famous EPIC platform - “End Poverty in California”. Although his socialism had always been nondoctrinaire, Sinclair was subjected to an intensive smear campaign which branded him as unjustly and eventually caused his defeat. Sinclair’s last major literary work, the “Lanny Bud” series, was begun in 1939 with World’s End, a socialist interpretation of history between the World Wars. The strong anti-Nazi flavor of several of the books made them extremely popular. 

Upton Sinclair House, National Register of Historic Places. Accessed December 21st 2020. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/123857944.

Upton Sinclair House, Wikipedia. Accessed January 22nd 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair_House.