Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Radical Innocent, Anthony Arthur's excellent new biography of Upton Sinclair, offers a marvelous anecdote about the day in 1904 when Sinclair first appeared at the Chicago stockyards, ready to research the novel that would become The Jungle.
The onlooker recalled the writer's words: "Hello! I'm Upton Sinclair! And I've come here to write the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Labor Movement!"
The story may well be "slightly apocryphal," writes Arthur. But Sinclair's comment perfectly captures the young socialist's goal: His book would awaken America to the horrors suffered by factory workers.
Instead, readers of the 1906 novel were horrified by Sinclair's descriptions of the meat produced in those factories. Still read in high schools today, The Jungle prompted the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. It got its 27-year-old author invited to the White House, where he met with Theodore Roosevelt. And though the novel did not ignite the socialist movement the way Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel set ablaze the abolitionists, The Jungle gave the idealistic writer and activist a platform he used for the rest of his life to continue his campaign to help the economically oppressed.
He had an astonishingly productive life. While The Jungle's centennial is the biography's peg, Arthur details Sinclair's many achievements. The author of dozens of books, Sinclair won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for the novel Dragon's Teeth, which detailed the rise of Hitler. He wrote trenchant exposes of religion, higher education and the press. He made a respectable showing as the Democratic candidate to be the governor of California in 1934.
Far before Betty Friedan, he recognized how housework and child care can thwart women's creativity and cause depression. With his first wife and son, he joined an early commune. He was also a visionary in his advocacy of exercise and a healthful diet. He knew and corresponded with Mark Twain, Jack London, H.L. Mencken, Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein. At 85, he was a popular college lecturer. Born 13 years after the Civil War, Sinclair would join Ralph Nader at a White House ceremony with LBJ before Sinclair's death in 1968.
Arthur pulls his portrait of Sinclair together by emphasizing what made him unique. Brilliant and creative, he possessed a rare spirit that allowed him to bounce back from defeats without growing cynical.
Arthur includes Sinclair's faults. Ferociously self-disciplined, he had little sympathy for weak people. He defined the terms "know-it-all" and "self-centered." He was an awful father to his only son. Though they eventually reconciled, Sinclair always put his own needs and those of his second wife first.
It also would no doubt please Sinclair that a century after he published The Jungle, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me are still making people think about what they eat.
Radical Innocent:
Upton Sinclair
By Anthony Arthur
Random House, 378 pp., $27.95
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
