Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair was born in 1878 to Upton Sinclair, Sr. and Priscilla Sinclair. His mother’s family was very affluent while his father was an unsuccessful liquor salesman; this gave Sinclair insight as to how both the rich and the poor lived in the late 19th century. In 1888, the Sinclair family moved to Queens, New York, and Sinclair started at the City College of New York just before his 14th birthday. He wrote dime novels and magazine articles to move his parents into an apartment when he was 17 years old. He then attended Columbia University, where he majored in law but also studied writing. After graduating, Sinclair married Meta Fuller in 1900, and the pair had their first child, David, in 1901. Sinclair then pursued a writing career, devoting his work to criticizing the social and economic conditions of the early 20th century. He went undercover to write the political exposé The Jungle, which addressed concerns in Chicago’s meatpacking plant. Following the success of the book, he ran (unsuccessfully) as a Socialist candidate for Congress. In 1911, Sinclair and Fuller divorced, and in 1913, Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough. From 1913 to 1914, Sinclair made three trips to the coal fields of Colorado to write his book King Coal. He then helped to organize against Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company, and in 1927, he wrote Oil! Sinclair also made multiple attempts to run for Congress throughout the 1920s and ran for the governorship of California in 1934. Sinclair continued to write throughout the 1940s and 1950s, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1943 for Dragon’s Teeth. Sinclair’s wife died in 1961, and he married for a third time, to Mary Elizabeth Willis. Following her death in 1967, Sinclair died a year later in 1968, in New Jersey.