On Upton Sinclair’s birthday, revisit David Denby on the muckraker, socialist, and author of the 1906 novel “The Jungle,” who believed the scramble for profits degrades American life.
Upton Sinclair: novelist, muckraker, socialist, utopian, pamphleteer, film producer, candidate, homeopath, fad dieter.A hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair, the muckraker and socialist, brought out “The Jungle,” a sensationally grim exposé of the noisome squalors and dangers of the meatpacking industry. Dedicated to “the workingmen of America,” the book became an overnight best-seller.
Although he was eager for fame his entire life, Sinclair also gave way to a periodic desire to live in a log cabin or, even better, a tent, and at the age of twenty-one, announcing to his friends that he was going to devote himself to art, he moved to a cabin near Lake Massawippi, in Quebec. There he subsisted on berries and nuts while nurturing prolonged ecstasies fuelled by nature walks and by literature, especially the poetry of Shelley.
Sinclair built his narrative around a family of immigrant Lithuanians who settle in the stockyard area known as Packingtown. They have few illusions about wealth; they expect little more than employment and freedom from tsarist corruption. The broadbacked hero, Jurgis Rudkus, is a virtuous prole whose refrain, no matter what happens to him, is “I will work harder.
It is the archetypal scene of industrial horror, an image that haunted the nation. If only Sinclair had possessed fiction-writing abilities equal to his ability to evoke squalor! One lurid catastrophe after another engulfs Jurgis Rudkus and his relatives—so many disasters that one suspects Sinclair outfitted the family with exactly those vulnerabilities which could be most grievously exploited by a brutal society.
By the twenties, he had settled in with a new wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough. Meta, after years of being tormented by her abstemious husband, had taken a number of handsome young men, including Sinclair’s best friend, as lovers, and Sinclair, charging Meta with “depravity,” had sued her for divorce, in 1911. Kimbrough, whom he always called “Craig,” was closer to him in temperament.
During the strike, Sinclair described John D., Jr., as “an inoffensive and possibly likable person” who was nevertheless the representative of “predatory force.” This double focus suggests an abandonment of the class-warfare melodrama that was so strong in “The Jungle.” By 1927, when Sinclair came to write “Oil!”—probably his second-best book and certainly his most readable—he was ready to look at a capitalist sympathetically, though without relinquishing his judgment.
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