Found Online Upton Sinclair

"Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. His alcoholic father sold liquor, and the family did not have much money while Sinclair was growing up. However, his grandparents were wealthy, and because Sinclair spent much of his childhood with them, he had an early vision of the disparities between rich and poor in nineteenth-century America. Sinclair would later remark that these disparities planted the early seeds of his views on social activism. Sinclair attended the City College of New York at the age of fourteen and first began publishing stories and articles to earn a living. He married Meta Fuller in 1900. Their relationship was often tumultuous, and she left Sinclair for another writer a decade after their marriage. Sinclair would marry two other times.

Sinclair began his major literary career by writing The Jungle, published in 1906. To write the novel, Sinclair went undercover in Chicago's meatpacking district. While there, he would meet many of the immigrant laborers that became the basis for the novel's characters. Sinclair originally published the novel as a serial in a popular socialist periodical. When Sinclair attempted to publish the work on a larger scale, several publishers at first rejected it because of its political leanings and its graphic depictions of violence. Sinclair self-published the novel before a major publisher finally picked it up, and the novel became a national sensation.

Though Sinclair had hoped the novel would be the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the socialist movement in America, its most notable contribution was alarming the public to the horrors of meat manufacturing. The novel attracted the attention of political leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, and was directly responsible for the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.

With the success of his novel, Sinclair attempted to start a socialist utopian commune named Helicon Hall. He founded the colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and attempted...