Historic Humanist Series

Upton Sinclair was a famous novelist and social crusader from California who pioneered the kind of journalism known as "muckraking." His best-known novel was The Jungle, which was an expose of the appalling and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry. The Jungle was influential in obtaining passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Sinclair's interests ranged over a wide variety of topics in his many books and articles. He would receive a Pulitzer Prize for a later novel about Hitler's rise to power. His contemporary, the writer Edmund Wilson, would say of him: "Practically alone among the American writers of his generation, [Sinclair] put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them."

--Wayne Wilson