UPTON SINCLAIR

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Renowned writer lived in Pasadena from 1915 - 1953

excerpted from http://www.online-literature.com/upton_sinclair/

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, and short story writer, whose most famous book is The Jungle (1906).

Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland. His family came from the ruined Southern aristocracy. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism shadowed Sinclair's childhood. When Sinclair was ten, the family moved to New York. He started to write dime novels at the age of 15 and produced ethnic jokes and hack fiction for pulp magazines to finance his studies at New York City College. In 1897 he enrolled Columbia University, determined to succeed while producing one poorly paid novelette per week. During these years he wrote stories for various boys' weeklies.

In 1900 Sinclair married his first wife (they divorced in 1911). The unhappy marriage led to the writing of Springtime And Harvest (1901). By 1904 Sinclair was moving toward realistic fiction. As a writer Sinclair gained fame in 1906 with the novel The Jungle, a report on the dirty conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry. The book won Sinclair fame and fortune, and led to the implementation of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Its proceeds enabled Sinclair to establish and support the socialist commune Helicon Home Colony in Englewood, N.J. However, this commune for left-wing writers burnt down after a year.

The Jungle set the tone for Sinclair's later works. It was followed by studies of a group, an industry, or a region, among others The Metropolis (1908), an exploration of fashionable New York society, King Coal (1917), a story about Colorado miner's strike of 1914, Oil! (1927), and Boston (1928), a depiction of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which caused widespread outrage in the 1920s. In Jimmie Higgins (1919) Sinclair portrayed the dilemma of American leftists who felt temporarily obliged to support the ruling classes of England and France during the World War I.

Sinclair lived in Pasadena from 1915 - 1953. He had joined the Socialist Party at the age of 24. In 1934 he ran for the governor of California, but failed to be elected. He spent the decade largely in other activities than writing novels: he experimented with telepathy and ran for political office.

Sinclair regained his reading audience in the 1940s with his 'Lanny Budd' series, consisting of 11 contemporary historical novels. The first novel in the series, World's End (1940) narrates the events of Budd's life between 1913 and 1919. Dragon's Teeth (1942), which dealt with Germany's descent into Nazism during 1930s to 1934, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1943. The final novel, The Return Of Lanny Budd (1953) deals with hostile sentiment in the USA toward post-war Soviet Russia.

From Pasadena, Sinclair suddenly moved in 1953 to a remote Arizona village of Buckeye. His second wife, whom he married in 1913, predeceased him in 1961, as did his third wife, in 1967. Sinclair died on November 25, 1968.