Upton Sinclair
1878–1968 · USA
“I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Upton Sinclair
Drew From(3)
who shaped Upton Sinclair
- The Jungle was conceived as a sequel by analogy — Sinclair wanted to do for the wage slave what Stowe had done for the enslaved
- Stowe proved a novel could move a nation to outrage and policy; Sinclair simply pointed the same weapon at the meatpacking floor
- Read Uncle Tom's Cabin first and the ambition behind The Jungle snaps into focus — it's working a form Stowe perfected
- The Jungle is a journey through hell, and Sinclair says so in Dante's own name
- He invokes Dante twice inside the novel — the peasants who declared the poet "had been into hell" — to frame Packingtown's horror against the Comedy
- Reading Dante first sharpens what Sinclair is doing: Jurgis's descent through the stockyards is structured like a passage through the circles of the damned
- The Jungle is the Communist Manifesto staged as fiction — Sinclair absorbed Marx on his 1902 conversion and built the novel toward an explicit socialist polemic
- Read Marx first and Jurgis's ruin reads as the thesis in human form: the worker as proletarian, capital as the machine that consumes him
- Written for the socialist paper Appeal to Reason, the book closes not on plot but on doctrine — the Manifesto's argument, delivered from a soapbox
Portraits
Young-man studio portrait from the George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress), the standard early likeness of Sinclair around the time of The Jungle; PD, no known restrictions.
Bain News Service, 1900
Cropped Los Angeles studio portrait from his California years; high-resolution dignified likeness of the established author. PD in the US.
1925
Famous Quotes
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
“They use everything about the hog except the squeal.”
“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.”
“Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!”
About Upton Sinclair
American muckraking novelist and political activist whose 1906 exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry, The Jungle, prompted Theodore Roosevelt to push through the Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair ran for governor of California in 1934 on the socialist EPIC platform, narrowly losing in one of the most fiercely contested elections in state history. He wrote nearly a hundred books across his long career.