Sinclair, Upton

SINCLAIR, UPTON (1878–1968). The greatest socialist writer of the age, Upton Sinclair poured into novels, plays, and essays his intense hatred for capitalism. He found a readership for denunciations of the many wrongs of American life and presented an interpretation of society in terms of class struggle, which makes his wide audience all the more interesting. Highbrow readers have often been uncomfortable at the limitations of his work as literature and laughed at his pre-Freudian view of individual psychology. “In so far as Mr. Sinclair’s books show us anything real,” wrote Van Wyck Brooks in 1921, “they show us the utter helplessness, the benightedness, the ignorance, the naiveté of the American proletarian movement.” But such views fail to account for the power of the novels, their widespread influence, and Sinclair’s energy and socialist fervor.

He was born in Baltimore and attended City College in New York. His literary career began in the popular fiction and journalism of the turn of the century. He wrote hackwork in the genres of commercial writing, turning out jokes, stories, sketches, serials, romances, and five-cent novels for adolescents. It was poorly paid, exploitative work that gave Sinclair an understanding of the way the poor were trapped. What he learned about plotting and characterization for a mass readership stayed with him when, in 1902, he was freed by the financial support of the Reverend George D. Herron to write his first serious novel, Manassas. His exposure to the Christian socialism of Herron, and the influence of William Morris and his American disciples who published the Comrade, came as a revelation. The conversion experience remained central to Sinclair’s radicalism. In his most important novels he sought to portray how the conversion to socialism might come about.

In 1904 he spent seven weeks in the stockyards of Chicago investigating conditions in the meatpacking industry. The novel he produced, The Jungle (1906), which was serialized in the Appeal to Reason, was in the best tradition of muckraking journalism. Jack London called it “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.” Despite the efforts of the meatpacking industry to discredit his novel, it made a substantial contribution to the campaign to regulate and inspect conditions. A disillusioned Sinclair remarked that he had aimed at the public heart and by accident hit the stomach.

Sinclair joined the Socialist Party in 1904, helped found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and used some of the profits from The Jungle to establish the Helicon Hall Home Colony in Englewood, New Jersey. He remained a convinced socialist long after many of his contemporaries had made their compromises with American capitalism. But he was without millennial expectations and shared the perspective of the right-wing leadership of the party, who believed that the future of the movement lay in patient electoral work, party propaganda, and a cautious cultivation of Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor. (In The Industrial Republic, 1907, he argued for a socialism that made no pretensions at changing business methods, or the moral and intellectual inclinations of his countrymen.) Although he broke with the party in 1917 and went on to publish a war novel (Jimmie Higgins), he soon repented his enthusiasm for Woodrow Wilson and in polemical books such as The Brass Check (1919), The Goose Step (1923), and Mammonart (1925), did much to stir up trouble for the establishment. He had an incomparable instinct for the scandals and oppressions of the day. In novels like King Coal (1917) and Oil! (1927) he showed how a journalistic persistence and a flair for exciting narrative could dramatize important contemporary issues from a socialist point of view.

In the early 1930s there was much ambivalence toward Sinclair within the Communist Party. Granville Hicks in The Great Tradition (1933) was curtly impatient with Sinclair’s free-floating (i.e., non-Party) socialism, and hostile toward his literary achievement. When Sinclair created a political action group, End Poverty in California (EPIC), which won control of the machinery of the Democratic Party in 1934, Communists bitterly opposed his candidacy. Although supported by a broad coalition of the unemployed, trade unionists, and progressives, he was narrowly defeated for governor in 1934.

After the EPIC campaign, Sinclair grew less politically active but maintained his extraordinary literary output. Beginning in 1939, he wrote a series of eleven “Lanny Budd” novels describing American history through the life of his protagonist. From Dragon’s Teeth, third in the series, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943. Other works notably lionized Franklin Roosevelt. The last in the series, Return of Lanny Budd, dramatized Sinclair’s vision of postwar democratic struggles against the Communists worldwide. Sinclair had, in his way, become almost respectable. He was widely praised in the mainstream media and translated into forty languages. And yet he remained, in his own eyes, a socialist and visionary late into his old age.

Arthur, Anthony. Radical Innocent Upton Sinclair. New York: Random House, 2006.

Coodley, Lauren. Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

Harris, Leon. Upton Sinclair: American Rebel. New York: Crowell, 1975.

Homberger, Eric. American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–39: Equivocal Commitments. London: Macmillan, 1986.

Mattson, Kevin. Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006.

Scott, Ivan. Upton Sinclair: The Forgotten Socialist. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.