Bibliography of Upton Sinclair: Books that Influenced Many

Upton Sinclair was born on September 20th 1878. He was exposed to dichotomies that had greatly affected his young mind. He was an only child of a father who sold liquor and a puritanical strong willed mother. He was raised in poverty and when he was 10 his father moved his family to New York City. He was already really smart he started reading and comprehending things kids his age didn’t he loved reading Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley. When he turned 14 he he attended the City College of New York and started publishing humor stories and children stories to magazines. He completed his schooling at age 20 and he met a girl named Meta Fuller and married her and started a family with her in 1900. He died on November 25, 1968 when he was 90, he had written more than 90 books, 30 plays and countless other works of journalism.

Sinclair is known for one of his novels named “The Jungle”. He was also called “king of muckrakers” because he went undercover for 7 weeks in the Chicago meat packing industry to find out and research on the lower class and immigrants and the obstacles they faced in the industries. Sinclair had written down that they were putting rats into sausage grinding machines and inspectors ignored the risk of selling diseased cows to the public. They had even had stories of guys falling into the meat packing machines and ending up getting sold with the meat from animals. All that would be left of the worker was his bones. Sinclairs finding played a great role in the Pure food and Drug act. After President Theodore Roosevelt read his novel he passed the Pure food and Drug act in 1906. The Book had grotesque descriptions and conditions in which the animals and workers had endured. After the book was published the White House was bombarded with 100 letters demanding a Federal cleanup of the meat industry.

The president Roosevelt wrote to Sinclairs publisher to tell him “ go home and let me run the country for a while” but Sinclair did not go home he wrote more articles and published books about abolition of child labor, birth control, Prohibition, utopian Socialism, an honest press, morality in business and industry, vegetarianism, mental telepathy and spiritualism, educational reform and civil liberties. Sinclair had written over 90 books throughout his lifetime there are a few more important than the rest like “The Jungle” which was about the meat industry having stories like people falling into the machines and getting sold with the meat and having diseased cattle and still cutting them and processing them thinking that will help anything.

He published numerous books including “The Metropoles” and “The King Coal”. Those books were published around the same time but was ultimately a failure than a success the only real success he had with publishing books was with “The Jungle”. In 1940 Sinclair published a book called “World's End” it was 1 out of the 11 Lanny Budd series to be published. Named for the protagonist who somehow manages to be at all of the most significant world events in the early 20th century. In 1942 Sinclair publishes a book called “Dragon's Teeth” which was about the rise of Hitler and how the Nazis raided Germany. The Meat industry was exposed for sanitation and the working conditions in the meat industry on the workers and the animals. His description of diseased, rotten, and contaminated meat shocked the public and led to new federal food safety laws like Pure food and Drug act. Another thing he exposed was factories using children younger than 15 to work in harsh conditions. He wrote and published articles about how children were getting treated and how much hours they worked and barely got money for their work.

There was 'King Coal' in 1917 that was about Rockefeller and the tragedies of a strike about getting more money and less hours. Most men died that day. It exposed of the venality of a subsidized press. 'The Goose- Step, ' in 1923, dealt with defects in the educational system and capitalist control of American colleges and universities.

Changes took place from Sinclair’s books like “The Jungle”. He had the President take action on businesses and change the way people work and how long and how much they get paid. It struck the heart of people changing the way people bought food and what they think. The Pure food and Drug act was passed in 1906 and it was because of the book. Many of his books had changed people and the way they do things but the Jungle” had the most effect on the world. It completely changed businesses and changed them to be more clean and less caustic to people eating the meat.