I am embarked on a Sinclair pursuit.
My next adventure will be The Brass Check, about the media, which I have already drawn from the PCL LIbrary at UT. Sinclair has also led me to decide to undertake Jack London in earnest.
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel,
The Jungle
(1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences expos
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel,
The Jungle
(1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
The Jungle
has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he 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." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.
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