
This last campaign attracted national attention, as Sinclair advocated sweeping government agricultural and industrial subsidies to combat the Depression. From 1917 to 1919 he briefly left the Socialist Party in protest against its antiwar stance, and again in 1934, to run as the Democratic candidate for governor in California. In 1906 he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New Jersey and, after moving to California in 1915, repeatedly sought to become that state’s congressman (1920), senator (1922), and governor (19). Sinclair joined the American Socialist Party in 1902 and throughout his life remained a committed non-Marxian socialist and crusader for social justice. Now among the foremost muckrakers, Sinclair published several further novels and nonfiction works on financial malpractices, the coal and oil industries, the 1920s Sacco and Vanzetti case, and the absence of integrity in journalism, religion, the arts, and education. To Sinclair’s annoyance, his graphic descriptions of unhygienic food preparation in the meat factories, not labor injustices, attracted public attention, providing final impetus for congressional passage of pure food and drugs legislation. Sinclair’s most famous novel was The Jungle (1905), written to expose appalling working conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry. Sinclair had early success with The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903), purportedly written by an obscure, impoverished dead poet, and Manassas (1904), a Southern epic of a plantation heir’s embrace of abolitionism. Whether fiction or reportage, his books were invariably enormously well-researched repositories of factual information. Always fluent and prolific, in college Sinclair wrote pulp fiction to support himself and during his long life produced over 80 books, including novels, plays, and social and economic studies.
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Sinclair originally intended to pursue graduate law studies at Columbia University, but a growing interest in politics and literature persuaded him to become a professional journalist and writer. He attended an East Side public school for three years before spending four years at the College of the City of New York, graduating with a B.A. When Sinclair was 10 his family moved to New York City.

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of an alcoholic salesman of Southern origin and Priscilla Augusta Harden, the daughter of a prosperous Maryland railroad executive. “ ‘Che fare?’: Silone and the Russian ‘Chto Delat?’ Tradition,” Modern Lan. Ignazio Silone (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). The Picaresque Saint (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959). The God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1949). Zurich Central Library has Silone correspondence.Ĭrossman, Richard (ed.). From their shared exile in Switzerland, Silone retained the isolation of “an artist who gave himself totally to his work.”Ĭentro di Studi Siloniani, Pescina, preserves copies of his papers.įondazione Turati, Florence, holds under seal the papers donated to the Centro di Studi e Documentazione Socialista. Finally, among literary figures he knew personally, he singled out Alois Musil for separate treatment. The political writings were inspired by Gandhi and especially Giuseppe Mazzini, whose works were scorned in school but later introduced by Silone as “the sincerest prophet and most devoted apostle” of international solidarity and political reform leading to socialism.
