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Birth of a Legend
Born in Baltimore and he was raised in New York Citry by 1888 -
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Stepping Stones
From the time they moved to New York city, Upton Sinclair was raised by his drunk dad. Even with his family being poor, he sometimes lived with his grandparents. At 14, he entered New York City College. And soon afterwards, he published his first story in National magazine. -
Family Start
Upton Sinclair married his first wife, Meta Fuller today. And he continued to publish books. -
The Socialist
Sinclair met the writer Leonard Dalton Abbott. He introduced him to George Davis Herron, a founder of the Rand School of Social Science, and Gaylord Wilshire. All the men were members of the Socialist Party of America, and suggested that he should read the books of Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Edward Bellamy, Karl Kautsky, Frank Norris, Jack London, Robert Blatchford and Thorstein Veblen. Sinclair took their advice and he soon became a committed socialist. -
Some Important books
The Journal of Arthur Stirling and Prince Hagen were written and were badly sold. But he was credited and commented by critics. -
Another fail of books
Manassas: A Novel of the Civil War , he failed to produce massively but was still acclaimed by the critics as a masterpiece. -
Books of the Age
Later in his years, he wrote the Jungle, a story that about the meat industry and how everything is processed as well as immigration in Chicago. -
The Jungle cont.
Sinclair sold over 150,000 copies. Within the first year, he recieved $30,000 in royalties (That is $600,000 today.)
After Theodore Roosevelt read it, he ordered that there be an investigation in the meat industry. He also met Sinclair and told him exactly that he disapproved of socialism being subjected in his book. But he agreed on radical action for the arrogant and selfish greed of capitalist. -
The Acts and Muckrackers
Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were passed, Sinclair was able to show other novelist that they could change the laws. Theodore Roosevelt took notice and called it "muckracking." -
Sinclair, Part of the Socialist Party
Sinclair by the end of this, became a well-known figure and decided to take the offer of the Socialist Party to become a candidate for the New Jersey. It's sad to say, he failed.
Sinclair used some of his royalties into making Helicon Home Colony, This was a Socialist community in Eaglewood, over the next six months, 80 people joined. -
The Jungle
Sinclair had his book the Jungle rejected six time and Macmillian said "I advise without hesitation and unreservedly against the publication of this book which is gloom and horror unrelieved. One feels that what is at the bottom of his fierceness is not nearly so much desire to help the poor as hatred of the rich." Sinclair decided to publish it himself and advertised it in Appeal to Reason. He got 972 orders for the book. When he told Doubleday about these orders, they decided to publish it. -
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Excerpt of The Jungle II
, 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 -
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Excerpt from The Jungle III
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. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one - there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. There was no place for the men to wash their hands before -
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Excerpt from Jungle IV
their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of -
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Excerpt of the Jungle V
the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water - and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public's breakfast. Some of it they would make into "smoked" sausage but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatine to make it brown. -
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Excerpt from The Jungle (Finally)
All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it "special," and for this they would charge two cents more a pound. -
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Excerpt from the Jungle
It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. 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 moldy and white - it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hopper -
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Unsuccessful Books
The Overman (1907), The Metropolis (1908), The Moneychangers (1908) and Love's Pilgrimage (1911) were very unsuccessful. His wife left him for a poet named Harry Kemp. -
Second times the charm
If that could be said for Upton Sinclair. They moved to a more radical place in New York City and Sinclair continued to write novels.
