The Normal Times

Author of The Jungle, The Brass Check, the Sylvia series, Oil!, and a million pointless political pamphlets.

Born in Baltimore in 1878 to an alcoholic liquor salesman and a severely religious woman who hated alcohol and caffeine. He grew up poor, sleeping at the foot of the household’s only bed like a dog. His father was not a successful man and the family had to move a lot.

Funny enough, his mother’s side of the family was very wealthy. Various members triumphing in their various enterprises. One of his cousins was Wallis Simpson, the divorcee that enraptured King Edward the VIII, leading to a constitutional crisis and his abdication in 1936. Upton’s paternal family had been wealthy, but they were a big deal Southern family, and the Civil War ruined them.

Sinclair learned to read around age five and kept up with it despite not starting school until age ten. Even with this setback, he was attending City College by age fourteen. He paid his tuition by grinding out dime novels and pulp articles. He was so prolific that he was able to buy his parents an apartment when he was seventeen. Unfortunately, he got into an argument with his mother shortly after this that led to thirty-five years of limited contact. If I had to guess, knowing him, it was probably some stupid tiff over socialism.

After graduating from City College, he attended Columbia, but dropped out without a degree. He spent most of his time there continuing to crank out pulp fiction and bitching about a lack of classes on socialism. After leaving school, he broadened his writing from pulp to muckraking and achieved enough success to never have to work a “real” job unless it was for source material.

Sinclair was weird about sex. He was opposed to both sex outside of marriage and sex for any purpose beyond reproduction. Despite being agnostic, he frequently met with a reverend that served as a kind of accountability buddy on his practice of abstinence. And despite being weird about sex, he had a few extramarital affairs.

He met his first wife, Meta, at age twenty-two. Even though they both thought it was probably a bad idea, the couple married a few months later, probably out of youthful horniness. Meta was knocked up shortly after, and in spite of several attempted abortions, Sinclair’s only child was born. Another child came into the picture after Meta revenge-cheated on Upton with a theology student.

After the publication of The Jungle, the family relocated to Delaware, where they tried to live in a radical Georgist single-tax community (Arden). A year later, it all went to shit. First, Sinclair had invited the chic “Vagabond Poet” Harry Kemp to camp out on his land, and Meta became so besotted with the hobo she ran off with him. Upton had to go all the way to Amsterdam to get a divorce in 1911. He had to convince them that the couple had lived there and that his wife had left him while visiting New York. Later that same year, he spent some time in jail after being arrested for having the audacity to play tennis on the Sabbath.

But he bounced back after a couple of years and married a rich Southern girl that he’d spend the next fifty years with. The reprieve of a harmonious household freed up his energies to pursue his perennial love of politics.

Starting in 1906, Sinclair would every so often take a whack at running for office, nearly always on a socialist ticket. It started with a failed run for Congress in New Jersey. After he moved to California with wife no. 2 in the 1920s, he decided to jump back in. He founded the state’s first ACLU chapter, ran for the House of Reps and failed, then ran for the Senate and failed.

Sinclair’s obsession with socialism was always his fail-point. Every book I’ve read of his, which is only two, could have been great if not for a sudden ham-fisting of how wonderful socialism would have solved all the characters’ terrible problems. It comes out of nowhere every time and take up a significant chunk of whichever book’s ending. Likewise, he seems to have sabotaged his campaign with his insistence of running on a socialist ticket. The one time he didn’t do this, the last time, was his most successful run, yet it destroyed the Socialist Party in California.

He made a go for the governor spot in 1934, only this time he ran as a Democrat, albeit on an obvious socialist “End Poverty in California” platform. The campaign got a lot of attention, both good and bad. This was in the thick of the Great Depression. Poor people loved Sinclair for his promises, while others were freaked out that they would encourage an even greater flood of Okie migrants that were already pouring into California seeking refuge from the Dust Bowl. The Hollywood studios hated him. They pumped out smear films and pressured their employees to vote in the Republican incumbent. Conservatives also tossed in their own Commie-bashing ads.

He won more votes than ever before, but his opponent still crushed him. After the loss, the Socialist Party, which had a nationwide policy forbidding members from being active in other political parties, kicked Sinclair and any socialist that had supported him out of the party. This ended up being so many that the party in California was left with little more than some stragglers. It fell apart shortly after.

After this final defeat, he mostly gave up on politics and retreated back into writing. He lived a quieter life and died at the ripe age of ninety. He’s buried in DC for some reason.