American novelist, socialist, and muckraker whose The Jungle (1906) is the founding text of American investigative fiction and one of the few American novels that directly produced federal legislation. Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover in the Chicago meatpacking plants researching the book, produced a narrative following a Lithuanian immigrant family destroyed by the packinghouses, and — though he intended the book as an indictment of wage labor — watched its descriptions of adulterated meat, rat droppings in the sausage, and the occasional worker rendered into lard produce the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. "I aimed at the public's heart," he famously remarked, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Over the next sixty years Sinclair produced more than ninety books — fiction, nonfiction, political tracts, self-publishing experiments — organized by a political vision that was consistently socialist, consistently American, and consistently unfashionable. Oil! (1927), later the basis for There Will Be Blood, is his Southern California oil-boom novel. Boston (1928), the Sacco and Vanzetti novel. The Brass Check (1919), the sustained attack on the American newspaper establishment. The eleven-volume Lanny Budd series, beginning with World's End (1940), dramatized 20th-century history through the eyes of a well-traveled American protagonist and won Sinclair his 1943 Pulitzer for Dragon's Teeth. In 1934, running as a Democrat on the EPIC (End Poverty in California) platform, Sinclair nearly won the California governorship, losing after a coordinated Hollywood-studio propaganda campaign that is widely regarded as the first modern political attack operation.
Sinclair's literary reputation is mixed — his prose is pedagogic, his characters programmatic — and he is more often written about now as a political figure than read as a novelist. But his documentary method, his commitment to the American working class as literary subject, and his willingness to spend a long life writing books intended to change things give him a distinct place in the American political-literary tradition, and contemporary readers of Matthew Desmond or Barbara Ehrenreich are walking on ground Sinclair cleared.