Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair was an American writer, whose best known book nowadays is The Jungle (1908). The Jungle was a "muckraking" book about the meat packing industry. While it is the book he is remembered for today, he wrote several others that were best-sellers of their time, such as the Lanny Budd series (1940-1953) beginning with World's End, that were set during the World War I and World War II eras and incorporated then-current events into the novels. In total he wrote over 90 books. Most of those books are today quite obscure.

Upton Sinclair's political views were leftist and socialist. He ran for public office several times, running for the U.S. Congress on the Socialist Party ticket in 1906 and 1920, the United States Senate on the Socialist Party ticket in 1922, and for governor of California on the Democratic Party ticket in 1934. The last of those runs was the only one in which he ever came close to winning public office. His 1934 run as a Democrat frightened a lot of people, who saw his EPIC (End Poverty In California) plan as an elaborate back-door scheme to bring communism to California, and he lost the election. Remarking on his electoral attempts in 1951, he said, "The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label. I certainly proved it...", adding that he had only won 60,000 votes running as a Socialist on an open platform of socialism, but 879,000 votes running as a Democrat on an "End Poverty In California" platform.

Upton Sinclair was a co-founder, along with fellow Socialist Party members Jack London and Norman Thomas, of the League for Industrial Democracy in 1905. This is the group whose student wing (the Student League for Industrial Democracy) would go on to change their name to Students for a Democratic Society in 1960 and become the genesis of the New Left campus unrest of the 1960s.