Sinclair was a writer whose main concerns were politics and economics. His ideas about literature--his own, written over more than six decades, and that of others--were inseparable from his dreams of social justice. Consequently, the great majority of his books, fiction as well as nonfiction, were written as specific means to specific ends. Since the essential purpose of literature, for Sinclair, was the betterment of human conditions, he was a muckraker, a propagandist, an interpreter of socialism and a critic of capitalism, a novelist more concerned with content than form, a journalistic chronicler of his times rather than an enduring artist. Since World War II, his literary reputation has declined. Yet The Jungle (1906) is one of the best known and most historically significant of American novels, and Sinclair himself remains an important figure in American political and cultural history.
Although it is possible to do justice to several of Sinclair's novels by examining them as individual literary works--particularly in the cases of The Jungle and Oil! (1927)--there are equally significant things to be learned by studying Sinclair's entire career and noting in it the interrelationships among his life, his times, and his writings. His single-minded intensity is the unifying feature. Sinclair was always the idealist--and the visionary--who agreed with Shelley that writers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, or at least should be, and who seldom doubted that his ideas and words would, if heeded, produce a better world. Beyond these surface attitudes, but never completely buried in his works, lie a number of contradictions and tensions. Sinclair was a person of essentially genteel and conservative upbringing who became a literary radical. Although he has often been seen as the champion of the oppressed, a novelist who wrote for and about the lowest working classes, many of his works have elitist tendencies. More than anything else, though, he was a nineteenth-century idealist of initially romantic and even Nietzschean traits who chose to confront the hard facts of twentieth-century industrial life. His sense of certainty led him astray at times and prevented him from creating complex modern works of fiction, but he probably had a larger and more concrete influence on American life than most other novelists of the twentieth century.
The origins of Sinclair's unique career lie in the circumstances of his childhood and adolescence: genteel cultural influences, poverty, idealism, ambition. He grew up in Baltimore and New York City as the only son of a ne'er-do-well salesman from a respected Virginia family. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy Baltimore family that presented a decided contrast to the usually shabby existence provided by his father. At the age of eighteen, while finishing up at the City College of New York, Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr., began his writing career as the pseudonymous author of boys' adventure stories for Street and Smith, the leading American publisher of pulp fiction and dime novels. In embarking upon a career as a hack writer, Sinclair sought, with considerable success, to achieve economic...