Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair's California

by Upton Sinclair, Lauren Coodley (Editor), Terry Beers (Editor)

Novelist and muckraker Upton Sinclair will forever be associated with The Jungle, however, Sinclair deserves equal accolades for his entertaining critiques of Southern California's oil industry, movie studios, and urban sprawl--most of which still apply today. The Land of Orange Groves and Jails spans fifty years of Sinclair's funny and fiery writings. Taken together, these plays, novels, articles, and pamphlets show how Sinclair's personal life inspired his political activism.

This quintessential rabble-rouser has found an advocate in Lauren Coodley, a professor of history at Napa Valley College. Beginning with her dissertation, Coodley has spent nearly ten years studying Sinclair's life and writings. She has rethought how we view Upton Sinclair, both as a Californian and as a writer who turned his own life experiences into political pop culture.

215 pages, Paperback

First published October 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

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've long wanted to know more about Upton Sinclair and this book covers his California years. Some of the Sinclair essays are hilarious and provocative; a few of the fiction pieces, I stopped reading mid-way. The snippet on his run for governor in 1934 made me want a fuller history.