A little more than one month ago, precisely on 20th September, the American writer Upton Sinclair would complete 140 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. With courage he exposed many injustices happening in the U.S. in the beginning of the 20th century. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair. The second was published at https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Upton-Sinclair-and-His-Influence-on-Society-F3C3T4LYVJ. The third was published at https://www.biography.com/people/upton-sinclair-9484897
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (1878-1968) was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. He won the Pullitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired fame for his classic novel The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S.meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later, The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a novel that exposed American Journalism and the limitations of the "free press" in the U.S. Four years after its publication, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." He is also remembered for the line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Sinclair describes the world of industrialized America. Novels such as King Coal (1917), Oil (1927) and The Flivver King (1937) described the working conditions of the coal, oil, and auto industries at the time. Sinclair ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a nominee from the Socialist Party. He was also the Democratic Party candidate for Governor of California, running under the banner of the End Poverty in California campaign, but was defeated in the 1934 election. Sinclair devoted his writing career to documenting and criticizing the social and economic conditions of the early 20th century in both fiction and nonfiction. He exposed the overwhelming effects of poverty among the working class.
Upton Sinclair wanted to be a great influence on society. He was born in Baltimore, from a family of Southern aristocracy. His father was an alcoholic and his mother came from a wealthy family. As a child, Sinclair was an excellent reader and scholar. By the age of fourteen, he began writing in his spare time. He attended Columbia University and later he moved to Quebe, Canada. There he lived in poverty. Sinclair emphasized that their values of hard work, family togetherness, honesty, and carefulness are the same as those of the reading public. They could not withstand the effects of greed and competition any more than individuals could. While influencing the families, the publication of The Jungle also influenced the workers of the meat processing industry. The meat packing scandal was front-page newspaper for weeks.
Upton Sinclair was an activist and writer whose works often uncovered social injustices. He was born in a small row house in Baltimore, and from birth he was exposed to dichotomies that would have influence his thinking later. The only child of an alcoholic liquor salesman and a puritanical, strong-willed mother, he was raised on the edge of poverty, but also exposed to the privileges of the upper class through visits with his mother's wealthy family. Having completed his schooling at age 20, Sinclair made the decision to become a serious novelist while working as a freelance journalist to make ends meet. In 1900, he also began a family, marrying Meta Fuller, with whom he would have a son, David, the following year. In 1904, he was sent to Chicago by the newspaper to write an exposé on the mistreatment of workers in the meatpacking industry. After spending several weeks conducting undercover research on his subject matter, Sinclair threw himself into the manuscript that would become The Jungle. Upon its release, Sinclair enlisted his fellow writer and writer and friend Jack London to help publicize his book and assist in getting his message across to the masses. Among its readers was President Theodore Roosevelt, who invited Sinclair to the White House and ordered inspections of the meatpacking industry. Sinclair published numerous works over the following decade, including the education critique The Goose-Step (1923) but most of hisw fiction during this period was commercially unsuccessful. By the early 1920s, he had divorced Meta, remarried Mary Kimbrough and moved to Southern California, where he continued both his literary and political pursuits. He founded in California the American Civil Liberties Union, His novels from this period fared better with Oil! (about the Teapot Dome scandal) and Boston (about the Sacco and Vanzetti case) both receiving favorable reviews. Eighty years after it appeared in print, Oil! would be made into the Academy Award-winning film There Will Be Blood.
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