Word: sinclairs
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...Jungle is a classic of American social reform, and it put Sinclair first in the company of early 20th century muckrakers: Frank Norris (The Octopus, The Pit), Ida Tarbell (The History of the Standard Oil Company), and Jack London (The War of the Classes). Sinclair started a short-lived Utopian community in New Jersey, called the Helicon Home Colony, with the $30,000 he earned from The Jungle...
Every Injustice. Sinclair came from a shabby-genteel Maryland family, absorbing from that background both a breadth of interests and a sympathy for other havenots. He helped support himself in college by peddling jokes to newspapers for $1 each. He ground out several pulp novels before The Jungle, and he read even faster than he wrote: in one two-week Christmas holiday, he got through all of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's poetry...
...California petroleum industry (Oil!), subservience of universities to business (The Goose-Step), cowardly book publishers (Money Writes!), the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti (Boston), the baronial life of Henry Ford (The Flivver King), and the ruthlessness of mine owners in the 1913-14 Colorado strike (King Coal). Sinclair also crusaded for birth control and childlabor laws, and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union...
EPIC Campaign. As a Socialist, Sinclair ran unsuccessfully in California for the U.S. Senate in 1922 and for Governor in 1926 and 1930. He switched to the Democrats and won their nomination for Governor in the 1934 primary by 436,000 votes. His EPIC platform-End Poverty in California-was probably as radical as that of any major party in U.S. history: applying Marxist theory, he proposed to turn over to the workers some of the means of production-in this case, California's Depression-idled farms and factories. Led by the Los Angeles Times, his alarmed opposition charged...
...World War II approached, Sinclair returned to writing full time. He began the eleven-volume series of novels that had as its unlikely hero Lanny Budd, a wealthy young American art dealer who wangles a secretary's job at the 1919 Paris peace conference and manages to find a front-row seat at nearly every historic event from then through 1949. The Lanny Budd novels contain in simple form a fictionalized, you-are-there chronicle of the 20th century. Dragon's Teeth (1942), third in the series, describes the rise of Hitler and won Sinclair a Pulitzer Prize...