Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair was born in Baltimore in 1878 to a genteel but impoverished Southern family and grew up partly in New York, where he entered college at fourteen. He paid his way by writing dime novels and stories. Converted to socialism, he went to Chicago in 1904 to investigate the stockyards, and The Jungle (1906), his novel of Lithuanian immigrants in Packingtown, became a best seller. Readers were horrified by its description of the meat they ate, and Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act that year. Sinclair said he had aimed at the public's heart and hit its stomach. He used the profits to found a cooperative colony in New Jersey, which burned down. He wrote more than ninety books, exposing the press, oil, coal and education, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for Dragon's Teeth, one of his Lanny Budd novels. In 1934 he ran for governor of California as a Democrat on a plan to End Poverty in California and lost. He died in New Jersey in 1968.

Upton Sinclair is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Raised by a strict Episcopalian mother; he identified as agnostic. Source: Wikipedia