Upton Sinclair: Two Minute Bio

Upton Sinclair is considered the greatest socialist novelist America has ever produced. Of course, that is not saying a whole heck of a lot since very few socialist novels ever got published in the past and the likelihood of any getting past the strong-arm of capitalist conglomeration today is about as likely as a reality show contestant (or host) being a member of Mensa. Although many critics like to point out that the average Upton Sinclair novel is short on characterization, that is hardly a disadvantage in a fiction of ideas. After all, how many character names can you come up with from an Eisenstein movie, yet most film scholars acknowledge that an Eisenstein film is better than a James Cameron film. And yet how many women between twenty-five and forty can give you the name of every single major character in Titanic?

Upton Sinclair was born in the town made famous by another literary inhabitant. I’m talking about Edgar Allan Poe and Baltimore. (Later made quirkily famous by the boys in Diner.) He received his education at City College of New York and quickly went to work as a journalist. Well, a journalist in the same way that Katie Couric might be said to be a journalist. Sinclair was, it must be frankly admitted, something of a hack as a newspaperman. Like John Stossel or Brit Hume, Sinclair would write anything that made him money to live on. Well, actually, he wasn’t at all like Stossel or Hume, who will write anything to get them the luxuries of life that Upton Sinclair never dreamed about. He turned to writing novels courtesy of some much-appreciated funding from a minister friend named George Heron. In 1902 he published his first novel, Manassas. Two years later he took the step that would change the course of his future and would eventually even touch upon the future of Daniel Day-Lewis: he joined the Socialist Party.

Although a socialist, to also call Sinclair a radical makes as much sense as claiming that the being a socialist is the same thing as being a fascist. While there are people who certainly assume that all socialists are radicals or fascists, the name best applied to those people is ignorant. In fact, Upton Sinclair made a habit of routinely ticking off some of his more radical brethren in the Socialist Party by taking a much more pragmatic approach to socialism.

It was also in 1904 that Upton Sinclair began visiting the stockyards of Chicago doing research for a novel that he hoped would expose the ugly underbelly of the meat-packing industry in America. That novel would be called The Jungle and it is one of the most influential novels ever written by an American. In addition to being the supreme example of socialist literature, it also proved the power of fiction by exposing light upon the kind of corporate conditions that John Stossel works so hard to apologize for and cover up. The Jungle was also instrumental in creating the muckraking novel that drew attention to social ills facing America. Sinclair’s place in American literature would be solid if only because of The Jungle, and its effect on making the meatpacking industry more sanitary than it had ever been. Today, such a novel would have trouble getting published and Upton Sinclair would probably be reduced to writing about corporate conditions in a blog that would be regularly mocked by the actors playing journalists on Fox News.

Today Upton Sinclair is better known as the man who wrote Oil!, the novel upon which the mainly Oscar-overlooked film There Will be Blood was based, albeit quite loosely. The rest of Sinclair’s career as a novelist was dedicated to exposing the inequities of fascist-style capitalism in America. He was one of the most prolific writers in American history, consistently turning his well-trained eye to the failures that were making most people slaves to a cadre of increasingly rich elite. He would eventually cop a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth, the third in his series of eleven Lanny Budd novels. The Lanny Budd series may remind you of Forrest Gump or, if you have more sophisticiated taste in film, Woody Allen’s masterpiece Zelig. Whereas Gump and Zelig witness great events in history from the outside, however, Lanny Budd is intimately involved in most of the world-changing events in history. The Lanny Budd series is a miniseries waiting to turn some lucky unknown writer and director into household name(s).

Upton Sinclair was more than just a witness to history as well. Or, at least, he tried to be. In 1934 Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California in a three man race. He came in second, but the results were clear. Just as Bill Clinton would have won in a landslide had Ross Perot not siphoned votes away from him in 1992, Upton Sinclair would have won and a Socialist would have been elected Governor of California. How times have changed.