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Upton Sinclair

American writer (1878–1968)

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Upton Sinclair was an American writer who lived from 1878 to 1968 and became known for exposing social and economic injustices in his work. His writings were influential in bringing attention to problems in American society, making him an important figure in early 20th-century reform movements.

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Upton Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968), was a Pulitzer Prize-winning prolific American author who wrote over 90 books in many genres. He achieved considerable popularity in the first half of the 20th century, gaining particular fame for his 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle. The book dealt with conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that partly contributed to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906 <a href=

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Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American author, muckraker journalist, and political activist, and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California. He wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his muckraking fictional novel, The Jungle, which exposed the labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the enactment a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of journalistic malpractice in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence" based on his wife Mary Craig Sinclair's book Southern Belle: A Personal Story of a Crusader's Wife. He is also well remembered for the quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." He used this line in speeches and the book about his campaign for governor as a way to explain why the editors and publishers of the major newspapers in California would not treat seriously his proposals for old age pensions and other progressive reforms. Writing during the Progressive Era, Sinclair describes the world of the industrialized United States from both the working man's and the industrialist's points of view. Novels such as King Coal (1917), The Coal War (published posthumously), Oil! (1927), and The Flivver King (1937) describe the working conditions of the coal, oil, and auto industries at the time.