Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer who writes nearly one hundred books and other works in several genres.

Sinclair's work is well known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and he wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

In 1906, Sinclair acquires particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel The Jungle, which exposes labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributes in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

In 1919, he publishes The Brass Check, a muck-raking exposé of American journalism that publicizes the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free press" in the United States.

Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists is created.

Time magazine calls him "a man with every gift except humor and silence".

He is also well remembered for the line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

He uses this line in speeches and the book about his campaign for governor as a way to explain why the editors and publishers of the major newspapers in California will not treat seriously his proposals for old age pensions and other progressive reforms.

Many of his novels can be read as historical works.

Writing during the Progressive Era, Sinclair describes the world of industrialized America from both the working man's and the industrialist's points of view.

Novels such as King Coal (1917), The Coal War (published posthumously), Oil! (1927), and The Flivver King (1937) describe the working conditions of the coal, oil, and auto industries at the time.

The Flivver King describes the rise of Henry Ford, his "wage reform" and his company's Sociological Department, to his decline into antisemitism as publisher of The Dearborn Independent.

King Coal confronts John D. Rockefeller Jr., and his role in the 1913 Ludlow Massacre in the coal fields of Colorado.

Sinclair is an outspoken socialist and runs unsuccessfully for Congress as a nominee from the Socialist Party.

He is also the Democratic Party candidate for Governor of California during the Great Depression, running under the banner of the End Poverty in California campaign, but is defeated in the 1934 elections.

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