Almanac of Story Tellers: Upton Sinclair

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Sept. 20th

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    It is the 263rd day of the year, leaving 102 days remaining in 2022.

   

    On this date in 1878, the author Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore.

    He told his stories with zeal and passion, seeking to rights the wrongs capitalism caused in the United States. He was a muckraker, an investigative journalist in the Progressive Era who went undercover to expose how big businesses and endangered workers in favor of excess profits. 

     He sometimes wrote news stories showing what he had found; just as often he wrote serialized fiction and novels with the information.

    He went into meat-packing plants, coal mines, automobile assembly lines, oil fields, and yes, even newspaper offices to expose safety hazards, labor violations, unsanitary conditions, unethical behaviors, and unsafe products caused by unsafe conditions.

    He is best known for his novel, The Jungle, serialized in a socialist newspaper during  1905, and published by Doubleday in 1906. It showed the inhumane mistreatment of immigrant workers and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry.

    Public reaction and public pressure forced Congress to regulate the industry for the first time by passing the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach," Sinclair later wrote.

    Later books included King Coal, about his investigations into the Colorado mining industry; The Brass Check, in which he explored "yellow journalism" used to exploit the news in favor of circulation and profits; Oil!, which covered the Teapot Dome Scandal; and The Flivver King, about Henry Ford and his efforts to replace skilled workers in the auto industry.

    Sinclair ran for office in his home state of California numerous times, including a 1934 run for governor on the Democratic ticket, in which he received 37.8 percent of the vote in a three-way race.

    He won the Pulitzer Price for Fiction in 1943 for the novel Dragon's Teeth, about the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1930s.

    He died in 1968 in Bound Brook, N.J.