Seven Oaks Magazine.

Kevin Mattson’s biography of the great muckraking American novelist Upton Sinclair—Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (Wiley, $33.99)—is the perfect proof that you can’t judge a book by its first few pages. Its publisher, a firm best known for innumerable books on business, investing and personal finance, has forgotten to eliminate from the copyright-page the boilerplate about not being responsible for any advice about money matters. This is followed by the author’s acknowledgements to, among others, his “mom” and his agent. These aren’t usually signs of good things to come. In fact, though, this is in its way a valuable book.

The incredibly long-lived Sinclair (1878-1968) was a writer, agitator and social critic best known for his 1906 novel The Jungle, a bleak and melodramatic tale of immigrant life and of capitalism run amok. It was set in the Chicago stockyards, which he described with a horrible vividness that caused him to say that he had aimed for readers’ hearts but hit their stomachs instead. The novel had two effects. It pushed the government of the day to carry through with the sort of legislative reforms now enshrined in the Pure Food and Drug Act. And it gave Sinclair—a socialist agitator who was also a thin-lipped and ascetic Puritan—a degree of celebrity that stuck to him for the rest of his life.

Indeed, Sinclair was one of the most widely known (and most widely reviled and denounced) public figures of his era, “one in which,” as Mattson writes, “intellectuals could be heroes. The intellectual had replaced the priest as a person who spoke to the public about issues of morality and gained the respect of readers.” Yet he’s barely remembered today, and with the exception of The Jungle few of his mountainous pile of books remain in print.

Although Mattson doesn’t say so explicitly, he has obviously taken it upon himself to educate a younger generation about Sinclair’s importance, not to say his very existence. We get the point when at the beginning he’s careful to explain what the initials FDR stand for. When he simply narrates events, he tends to do so in slapdash conversational prose that can grate on experienced readers. When he switches from relating to interpreting, however, the tone is thoughtful and more serious. In the end, he achieves the quite difficult feat of producing an excellent short biography.

Sinclair was the offspring of distressed gentlefolk in Baltimore (Wallis Simpson was his cousin). When deciding to become a writer, he committed himself to an existence of poverty, despair and rejection. Mattson believes that his conversion to socialism after the turn of the century had much to do with the way the New York publishing industry mistreated him. After passing through a period of writing soppy romantic tales, he stumbled on the idea for The Jungle, doing research in the abattoirs and writing in a tiny shack where he would “break down in crying fits, because the material was so troubling and because his own family’s poverty was so abject.” Then as later, “He wrote mainly to convince others of his views […] His writing rarely reaches the level of literature […] Most of his novels read as if Sinclair is cruising through them, wishing he didn’t have to spend time developing plot or dialogue. The characters often seem devised to make points better made in non-fiction.” All the same, the fictional of Jurgis, the Lithuanian immigrant who sees a co-worker ground up for sausage and loses his family and his own self-respect, is a memorable creation.

As a result of The Jungle, Sinclair became a hot property, and he resolved “to reach large numbers of Americans in order to grow the ranks of the Socialist Party and use his gifts of publicity and writing for a cause.” And he was a highly effective preacher of this particular gospel, because he “made socialism sound American, arguing that ‘the essence of Socialism is democracy.’ He elucidated how socialism would not enslave people to the state but would free them from the obligations of producing to survive.” But his skill and his zeal led him to write far too much far too quickly.

The Jungle also made him quite a bit of money, which he used to establish a utopian community called Helicon Hall, which was destroyed in a fire the following year. Thus began what seems, in long retrospect, the comically melodramatic aspect of his life, with constant leapfrogging between windfalls and downfalls, all of them acted out against a backdrop of scandal both personal and political. Yet through it all he remained true to his principles, as when he opposed American participation in the First World War, though his greatest influence was as a force for social rather than political change.

“Surprising though it might seem,” Mattson writes, “much of American cultural life during the 1920s was indebted to changes Sinclair had helped push [earlier]. Equality between the sexes, birth control, relaxed prohibitions on divorce, the primacy of self-expression over the accumulation of wealth, a life of experimentation over conformity to preset rules―these features of prewar bohemia seemed to leave the confines of Greenwich Village and Carmel and seep into middle-class life during the 1920s.” But he despised the popular culture of the times, with its flappers and flivvers and bathtub gin, even as he tried to strike it rich in the movie industry.

In the interwar period, Sinclair published novels denouncing Henry Ford and the coal and steel industries, but he turned largely to non-fiction exposés of, among other things, public education, newspapers, organized religion, alcoholism and (surprise) the book publishing racket―“works of social criticism that held out the hope of socialism and thereby defeated the popular cause of intellectual cynicism.” Mattson is forced to throw up his hands at one of these efforts, calling it “surely one of Sinclair’s worst books ever.” This is a faint sample of the way Mattson admires his subject’s progressive politics without caring much for his personality.

The Depression presented Sinclair with his greatest challenges. His rise to meet them found expression in his run for the California governorship on a platform he called EPIC—End Poverty in California. The state’s conservative interests, ranging from Louis B. Mayer to the Los Angeles Times, defeated him with tactics probably unrivalled in American politics for their low-down dirtiness, which is saying something. Yet in one sense he was the victor. Many of his campaign ideas (though not that of “factorizing” unused industrial plants by turning them over to craft workers to run at subsistence level) helped push Franklin Roosevelt to the left, towards the radical policies that saved capitalism and ultimately democracy.

Sinclair’s blind spot was Russia. Although not himself a communist (he became an anti-communist in fact), he was never quite able to put aside his vision of the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise. This led him to more or less ignore Stalin’s purges and later cheer the Hitler-Stalin pact. When the Second World War followed, he returned to fiction with a long sequence of novels tracing the story of Lanny Budd, a playboy socialist who worked as a kind of diplomat/spy/presidential emissary. As one critic said, Lanny was as omnipresent as God: wherever there was trouble in the world, he always seemed to turn up, meeting all the powerful people from Churchill to Hitler to Mao. “It is good history,” George Orwell commented, “if mediocre fiction.” The books taught two generations of American readers to understand the complexities of the events swirling round them.

In Mattson’s view, “Sinclair’s most significant work emerged when he refused to lock the world out and live for the realm of the imagination. In his greatest life accomplishments—the writing of The Jungle, the run for governor of California, and the Lanny Budd books—it was real people and the events of history that tugged at him and that helped prod him toward his highest accomplishments.” He goes on to say that “Sinclair seemed utterly mainstream by the 1950s: he was anti-communist, liberal, and mainline Protestant…” By the 1960s he had become a Kennedy Democrat of sorts: pro-civil rights but pro-Vietnam War. Well, he lived a very long time and his life, like most people’s, was a tussle between change and resistance to change.

Mattson is a political person and his book is a political biography. It should be interesting to compare it with Anthony Arthur’s Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, a literary biography that will appear in late June (Random House, $36.95) at the same instant as a new edition of The Jungle (Random House, $12.95 paper) with an introduction by the late and lamented Jane Jacobs.

George Fetherling is the author, most recently, of Tales of Two Cities: A Novella Plus Stories (Subway Books).