Arts and Letters

For Upton Sinclair, writing was not an end in itself. It was a way to tell the world what was wrong and how to put things to right. He used the old melodramatic forms of fiction. He believed in a moral society, in an enlightened government, in a literate democracy and in the possibility of attaining a socialist Utopia. And from the time of The Jungle, his exposure of conditions in the Chicago Stockyards (which led to the passage of the first Food and Drug Act), through his novels on the venality of the press, the corruption of the universities, the evils of alcohol, the miseries of the coalfields, he remained an upright moral force, a large and controversial propagandist. He was a mild-mannered man, with a quiet Southern accent and gentle humorous eyes.

I met him on only one occasion, late in life; and if he talked of things long ago, and of fires long extinct, he spoke still with understandable pride of the ninety books he had written and the forty languages into which many of them had been translated; and of his Lanny Budd books, those eleven volumes which the obituaries said contained 7,364 pages in all. These books, written after he was sixty, had been a tour de force of his elderly years—an attempt, as it were, when all his earlier energies were spent, to visit all the crucial historical moments of our time in the person of his wandering hero, a kind of political superman of international intrigue.

He embraced many causes because he was an old-fashioned right-thinking man; and he preached without fanaticism. He took the old naturalist novel of Zola and converted it into the "problem novel"; in his prime he was among those who caused Theodore Roosevelt to invoke the term "muck-raker." With a flair for vivid story-telling, he was able to transpose his journalistic inquiries to the realm of fiction: and if some of his novels dealt with ephemeral issues, they were nevertheless issues of the greatest importance in his time. As his pen was in the service of reform, so he put it also in the service of art; and never more so than when Serge Eisenstein, the Russian master of the film, went to Mexico on behalf of Hollywood to make an elaborate movie. Things went wrong and Sinclair tried to put them to right. He found himself sustaining on a slim budget the enterprise of a moviemaker accustomed to the largesse of ministries. Things collapsed for him also, but out of this adventure Sinclair salvaged some of the memorable Eisenstein sequences which we know as Thunder Over Mexico.

His work embodied the history of an entire era in American life; and it reflected a vision of great probity and vitality. If Upton Sinclair's books will seem quaint in the future, and the issues for which he fought will seem out-dated by the age of technology, they nevertheless constitute a remarkable record—of reportage, of intimate American life, of old-time American liberalism.