The Metropolis: Literary Classics

Presents Sinclair's portrait of the extravagant life of New York City's wealthy elite.

Upton Sinclair?(1878 - 1968) achieved early fame for his novel?The Jungle(1906).?Intended to lead to improved working conditions for the exploited immigrant workers in the meat-packing industry,?The Jungle?led to passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, to protect consumers. Publication of the novel placed Sinclair in the ranks of the early twentieth-century muckraking writers who used their pens to expose corruption and social injustice. He used the royal-ties from?The Jungle?to help found a cooperative-living venture, Helicon Hall, in Englewood, New Jersey.?

His interest in social and industrial reform underlies most of his over eighty books, including the topical and polemical novels?The Moneychangers?(1908),?King Coal(1917),?Oil!?(1927), and?Boston?(1928); a cycle of eleven historical novels about a contemporary American, Lanny Budd; and many political and social studies such as?The Profits of Religion?(1918) and?The Goose-Step?(1923). Sinclair won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize for?Dragon's Teeth, the third novel in the Lanny Budd series.?

For many years he was active in California politics.?In 1934 he received the Democ-ratic nomination for governor of California, running on the Socialist reform platform EPIC (End Poverty In California).?He founded the American Civil Liberties Union in California.