Little Steel

by Upton Sinclair

hardcover with dust jacket.

Genres: Fiction

308 pages, Hardcover

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

[Mike Zickar · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book that seems to have been ignored by nearly everyone who has written about Sinclair. The book focuses on a steel industry executive, Walter Quayle, and how he falls under the spell of two anti-labor management consultants. The book covers Quayle's journey from a kind leader to a rabid, anti-labor (root out the Reds) figure, and then back to a leader with a heart.

The book has more suspense than a typical Sinclair novel (outside the Lanny Budd series) and includes a fun chase scene toward the end. Strangely, the book ends abruptly with little resolution.