Upton Sinclair, born in 1878 in Baltimore, was the youngest and the last of the muckrakers, those writers around the turn of the 20th century who exposed corruption in American corporate and political life. Sinclair also may be considered the greatest, if for no other reason than that his most well-known book, “The Jungle,” is still being widely read in multiple editions on the 100th anniversary of its original publication in 1906.
The chief reason for its longevity may be that, unlike the work of such muckrakers as Ida Tarbell and David Graham Phillips, “The Jungle” is a novel, albeit one based on diligent, unimpeachable research. It grips the reader by its depiction not only of the horrifying conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry, but also of the pitiful lives the industry destroyed. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” to which Sinclair himself and others have compared it, “The Jungle” had a direct and lasting impact on national life, helping lead to the passage of the first Pure Food and Drug law months after its publication.
If anything else is generally known about Sinclair – other than his running for and almost winning the governorship of California as a Democrat in 1934 – it probably is the vague notion that he was some kind of social and political crank. Crank he was not, though his friendly antagonist, H.L. Mencken, accused Sinclair of never meeting a fad he didn’t like, and Sinclair was associated with more than one communal activity, which got him wrongly labeled as a free-love advocate.
The great virtue, then, of Anthony Arthur’s “Radical Innocent” – only the second biography since Sinclair’s death in 1968 at age 90 – is that it shows what an estimable writer of fiction he was.
At 22, Arthur writes, Sinclair “made a conscious decision to become a literary artist of the first rank.” If he fell short of his goal it was not for lack of trying. From his teens, when he began supporting himself by writing, until his 70s he wrote a ton of fiction and nonfiction – about 90 books in all, plus a couple of hundredweight of articles and essays – and a lot of it, in Arthur’s analysis, is a lot better than Sinclair’s detractors claim.
Arthur, a professor emeritus of literature at California State University, Northridge, and author of other books on American history and culture, particularly commends the series of 11 Lanny Budd novels that tell the history of the 20th century, begun in 1940 and completed in 1953, calling them Sinclair’s “greatest artistic achievement.” “Dragon’s Teeth,” the third in the series, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943.
The author chose his seemingly contradictory title well. Sinclair discovered socialism in his mid-20s and battled for its principles from then on.
Yet he believed people were basically good. Although he was not an expressed Christian, his outlook was essentially that of a Christian socialist. All his life he remained a Victorian-age romantic idealist.
But because “he subordinated everything to what he saw as the need to work for social justice” – indeed, his target in “The Jungle” was the inhuman working conditions of the meatpacking industry, not its filth – he has been perceived primarily as a propagandist. His lack of sensitivity concerning human psychology also was a singular handicap as a novelist, Arthur says – until the Lanny Budd novels.
The subjects of his fiction, written at astonishing speed, covered an astonishing gamut. He wrote other exposé-type novels, “Oil!” and “Boston,” that garnered wide praise.
He wrote “Co-op,” a novel startlingly similar to “The Grapes of Wrath,” but published in 1936, three years before the John Steinbeck novel. Another novel of the 1930s, “The Gnomemobile,” was turned into a Disney movie 30 years later.
His long life had its share of personal woes. His first wife left him for his good friend after Sinclair caught them playing “leapfrog” – as the friend styled it – in the woods.
Though his second, 48-year marriage was a close and contented one, his second wife seems to have been a difficult person and the chief cause of his decades-long estrangement from his son (from the first marriage). He married yet again at age 83, and this wife, too, predeceased him, by a year.
Sinclair knew everybody from Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt to Thomas Mann and Lyndon Johnson.
Few authors have led as full and fascinating a career, and rare is the biographer capable of packing the fascinating fullness as compactly – and apparently completely – as Arthur has done.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
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Radical Innocent
Upton Sinclair
By Anthony Arthur
Random House, 384 pages, $27.95
