Upton Sinclair books

Annapolis Reading Order

Anthologies

Lanny Budd Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Standalone Plays

West Point Reading Order

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878, into a Southern family that had lost its wealth after the Civil War. His father was an alcoholic liquor salesman, and young Upton grew up moving between poverty at home and wealth at the homes of his mother’s well-off relatives. This stark contrast between rich and poor left a lasting mark on his politics and writing. He entered the City College of New York at age fourteen, paid his way by writing for pulp adventure magazines, and later attended Columbia University.

Sinclair published his first novel in 1901 and spent the next six decades writing at a relentless pace. The Jungle (1906), his investigation of Chicago’s stockyards, made him famous and led directly to federal food safety legislation. He followed it with dozens of novels that took on the coal industry (King Coal, 1917), the oil business (Oil!, 1927), the Sacco-Vanzetti case (Boston, 1928), and the auto industry (The Flivver King, 1937). His non-fiction was just as prolific: The Brass Check attacked American journalism, The Profits of Religion examined organized religion’s role in maintaining inequality, and The Goose Step and The Goslings targeted universities and public schools. In 1930 he published Mental Radio, a study of his wife Mary Craig’s supposed telepathic abilities, with a preface by Albert Einstein.

Beyond writing, Sinclair ran for public office several times as a socialist before winning the 1934 Democratic primary for governor of California on his End Poverty in California (EPIC) platform. He lost the general election after Hollywood studios and big business mounted one of the first modern media campaigns against him. His eleven-volume Lanny Budd series, following a fictional art dealer and secret agent through the major events of the twentieth century, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for its third installment, Dragon’s Teeth. Sinclair died on November 25, 1968, in Bound Brook, New Jersey, at age ninety.