King Midas

by Upton Sinclair

Springtime and Harvest, later renamed King Midas, is a 1901 novel written by Upton Sinclair. It was written shortly after the breakup and divorce of his wife. The book is about two young, poor lovers who have been cursed so that whatever they touch becomes covered in ivy.

- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Genres: Classics

Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2004

About the author

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 2 out of 5]

Feb 7, 930pm ~~ Review asap.

Feb 8, 930am ~~ Upton Sinclair is one of my 2023 authors. I found six titles of his at Gutenberg that I had never heard of, let alone read. King Midas is first on the list and the first novel he wrote.

I did not really care for it the way I was so absorbed in other titles such as The Jungle and Oil!; I was even tempted to give up on it fairly early because I completely detested his main female character Helen. She was selfish, egotistical and cruel. She cared about nothing but her own happiness.

"She had never formulated any rule of life to herself, but that which she sought was joy, primarily for herself, and incidentally for other people, because unhappy people were disturbing (unless it were possible to avoid them.)"

In the first chapter Helen has returned home after three years in Germany, where she studied music and how to be part of Society. She goes for a walk into the beloved hills near her house and there meets Arthur, a young man who had been her childhood friend. He is thrilled to see her again; he has spent three years remembering their good bye kiss and has turned that kiss into True Love.

But not Helen. She is astounded by Arthur's expectations and very coldly lets him know the actual state of the situation. Cue extremely melodramatic reactions on Arthur's part, which merely disgust Helen. Aunt Polly, who had paid for the German education, comes to the rescue and takes Helen away to meet eligible men. Rich men who are not mere poets with no future and a murky past.

They say a first novel is usually influenced by the author's own life, more so than any subsequent book that author may write. This book certainly sets out what I discovered (through Wiki) were the fundamentals of Sinclair's beliefs about relationships between men and women before marriage and his grandiose expectations of those relationships after marriage.

May I just say that while I have always been impressed with Sinclair's thoughts about the workers of the world and about Society, his ideas about personal relationships stink. Things happened in this book that are natural human events but they are portrayed as the true and actual End Of The World. I am not sure that such melodramatic reactions would have been the norm even in 1901 when King Midas was published. Upton Sinclair was born in 1878 so would have barely been into his twenties while writing this book. That is young to be so unbending in your thoughts, and I very greatly doubt that the other young men of his day felt the same as he did.

I'll tell you why I kept reading and did not give up on the book. You know how in a movie or soap opera you want to see the evil character get his or her payment for being the way he or she is? That was what I wanted to find out: how would Sinclair handle Helen in the later chapters? Would she learn anything? Would she become a model of womanhood according to the Sinclair idea or would she rebel against that the way she rebelled against a simple honest love? Or would somebody slap her silly the way I wanted to do so many times and tell her to grow up?!

The next book on the Sinclair list is described in the only GR review of it as being about humankind's ultimate destiny. Sinclair riffed on that a little bit in King Midas through the character of David Howard, so I have a slight idea of what to expect from the book. But I will let my irritation with Helen and Sinclair himself settle a bit before I start The Overman.

[Debesuota · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.sınıfta okuduğum ve adını hatırlamadığım bir hikayeye benzediği için almıştım. O mu bilmiyorum ama kızı altına dönüşen bir kralın anlatıldığı çok kitap yoktur fdgsd. Klasik bir açgözlülük masalıydı. Onun dışında pek bir şey katmıyor.

[Raymond Burchette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful story

Totally unlike anything Sinclair usually writes but it is a great story of love and decency and what doing the right thing can do to change your life.