Upton Sinclair

California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual

Lauren Coodley

• Publisher: Bison Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496209788
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Had Upton Sinclair not written a single book after The Jungle, he would still be famous. But Sinclair was a mere twenty-five years old when he wrote The Jungle, and over the next sixty-five years he wrote nearly eighty more books and won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He was also a filmmaker, labor activist, women's rights advocate, and health pioneer on a grand scale. This new biography of Sinclair underscores his place in the American story as a social, political, and cultural force, a man who more than any other disrupted and documented his era in the name of social justice.

Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual shows us Sinclair engaged in one cause after another, some surprisingly relevant today—the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, the depredations of the oil industry, the wrongful imprisonment of the Wobblies, and the perils of unchecked capitalism and concentrated media. Throughout, Lauren Coodley provides a new perspective for looking at Sinclair's prodigiously productive life. Coodley's book reveals a consistent streak of feminism, both in Sinclair's relationships with women—wives, friends, and activists—and in his interest in issues of housework and childcare, temperance and diet. This biography will forever alter our picture of this complicated, unconventional, often controversial man whose whole life was dedicated to helping people understand how society was run, by whom, and for whom.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Southern Gentlemen Drank, 1878–1892
• 2. Making Real Men of Our Boys, 1893–1904
• 3. Good Health and How We Won It, 1905–1915
• 4. Singing Jailbirds, 1916–1927
• 5. How I Ran for Governor, 1928–1939
• 6. World’s End, 1940–1949
• 7. A Lifetime in Letters, 1950–1968
• Afterword: A World to Win, 1969–2011
• Appendix A: Upton Sinclair’s Women Friends
• Appendix B: Recommended Reading
• Notes
• Index