Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. Born in Baltimore, Md. 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 Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth. Skip to main content. Search for:. He died on November 25, , at the age of 90, having written more than 90 books, 30 plays and countless other works of journalism.
We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Wells was a writer of science-fiction works, including 'The Time Machine' and 'War of the Worlds,' who had a great influence on our vision of the future.
Amiri Baraka is an African American poet, activist and scholar. He was an influential Black nationalist and later became a Marxist. Fantasy writer George R. Margaret Sanger was an early feminist and women's rights activist who coined the term "birth control" and worked towards its legalization.
Thurgood Marshall was instrumental in ending legal segregation and became the first African American justice of the Supreme Court. The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old sacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked again, and so on, until by night-time a man would be walking on great lumps the size of the feet of an elephant.
He builds his effects through precise reporting and the remorseless piling up of detail; he was a master of the routines of physical labor and the gear-by-gear minutiae of industrial processes.
In the meatpacking scenes, he holds his rhythm steady and lets the hideous facts do their work:. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was mouldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.
There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats.
These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. It is the archetypal scene of industrial horror, an image that haunted the nation.
If only Sinclair had possessed fiction-writing abilities equal to his ability to evoke squalor! One lurid catastrophe after another engulfs Jurgis Rudkus and his relatives—so many disasters that one suspects Sinclair outfitted the family with exactly those vulnerabilities which could be most grievously exploited by a brutal society.
Jurgis is injured, loses his job, and takes to drink; his pretty young wife, who also works in the meatpacking district, is bullied by her foreman into becoming his mistress; their little boy drowns in the Packingtown muck.
It has remained a moral text if not quite a literary one. Any kind of inwardness was beyond Sinclair: his characters, suffering without any gain in consciousness, remain mere names attached to depressing social conditions.
Roosevelt brushed off the call for socialist revolution, and though he acted vigorously on contaminated food, his measures were neither as vigorous nor as comprehensive as Sinclair wanted. In the spring of , at the time of the signing of the Pure Food and Drug Act, Sinclair was trying to build socialism on a small scale.
His idea was that a select group of intellectuals and artists would band together and hire people to cook and clean for them and look after their children, leaving them free to work and exchange ideas.
A refuge from commercial society, the enterprise was a descendant of the nineteenth-century colony Brook Farm, but without the emphasis on physical labor and schooling or the philosophical strength of Transcendentalism to hold it together.
Helicon Hall became famous overnight and was visited by William James, Emma Goldman, and John Dewey, who joined the board of directors. In the Helicon Hall affair, as on other occasions, Sinclair was plagued by the kind of comic misfortune that tends to befall those bent on improving themselves and others.
He was skeptical of the morals of industrialists and newspaper publishers but receptive to the delusions of quacks. He had a weakness for nostrums and half-baked schemes including his own. He must die daily that we may live in peace, corrupt and contented.
In the nineteen-twenties, when other American writers were excited by Freud, Joyce, and Picasso, or by jazz, flappers, and booze, Sinclair was devoted to popular fads like dieting and homeopathy.
At various times in his life, he gave himself over to programs of fasting, prolonged chewing, colonic cleansing, and other such methods of ideologically approved digestion.
He practiced a kind of socialism of the body, its constituent parts rehabilitated along progressive lines—tennis for the heart and lungs, nuts and berries for the colon. By the twenties, he had settled in with a new wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough.
She believed in his abilities and wanted to protect him—and she possessed a useful talent for shrewd real-estate deals. In , they moved to Southern California, a land with ripening property values, a rapidly expanding economy, and a fondness for spiritualist cults. The place, then in one of its Ouija-board phases, seems to have hit the two of them hard.
He was a humorless and sententious man, obtuse in many ways, but so resourceful that he drew all sorts of people to him. Rockefeller, with his sour contempt for humanity; D.
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