Upton Sinclair

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an accomplished American author, journalist, politician, and political activist. He was born on September 20, 1878, and passed away on November 25, 1968. Sinclair is best known for his literary fiction and non-fiction works that often tackled the issues of 19th Century industry. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943 for his novel Dragon's Teeth.

Sinclair's works were extremely popular in the early 20th century, and he has over 100 novels and several other works in various genres and fields to his name. His most famous work, The Jungle, is an expose about the conditions of the United States meat packing industry. To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover, working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. His direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed to the enactment of the Food and Drugs Act and the meat inspection Act.

Apart from his career as an author, Sinclair was also a political activist and ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist. In 1934, he was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated. Sinclair also published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." Sinclair is also remembered for writing the famous line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."