Upton Sinclair Standalone Novels books in order

Reading order

Upton Sinclair’s standalone novels cover an enormous range of American life across six decades. The most famous is The Jungle (1906), his expose of the Chicago meatpacking industry that led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover in Chicago’s stockyards before writing the novel, intending to expose the exploitation of immigrant workers. Readers, however, were more horrified by the descriptions of rotten meat and filthy processing conditions, prompting President Theodore Roosevelt to push for new food safety laws. Sinclair later summed up the response: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

His other standalone novels tackled one major American industry or issue after another. King Coal (1917) drew on the 1913-1914 Colorado coal strikes and the Ludlow Massacre. Oil! (1927) followed a father and son through the Southern California petroleum boom, touching on labor struggles, religious hucksterism, and political corruption. Boston (1928) was a documentary novel about the Sacco and Vanzetti case that mixed journalism with fiction. The Flivver King (1937) traced the history of the Ford Motor Company and the auto workers’ fight for union recognition. Even The Gnomobile (1936), a children’s book about forest gnomes and California redwoods, was one of the earliest environmentalist stories for young readers and was later adapted by Walt Disney as The Gnome-Mobile (1967).

Sinclair’s fiction always had a political purpose, and his standalone novels form a kind of running commentary on American capitalism throughout the twentieth century. Whether he was writing about meat, coal, oil, automobiles, or the court system, his method was the same: research the subject firsthand, then wrap the facts in a readable story.