(2 of 3)
Check), money-grubbing ministers (The Profits of Religion), land exploitation by the 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 that Sinclair planned to Sovietize the state and nationalize children. Despite the scare campaign against him, he came within 259,000 votes of winning.
As 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 in 1943.
George Bernard Shaw, who once proposed Sinclair for the Nobel Prize, told him: "When people ask me what happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to authorities but to your novels." Sinclair has probably been read as widely abroad as any U.S. writer, and in spite of his antiCommunism, he is particularly popular in the Soviet Union. At recent count, there were 772 translations of his books in 47 languages, published in 39 countries.
Jesus and Shelley. Sinclair's writing was long-winded, his naivete often distracting, his fiction more polemical than literary. He was a vegetarian who lived on brown rice, fresh fruit, celery and dried milk. He never smoked or drank (his temperance tracts were inspired by the sad example of his father, an alcoholic whisky salesman). He dabbled in spiritualism.
Despite his eccentricities, Sinclair was a quiet, gentle man who claimed an unexceptionable pantheon of heroes: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. Critic Alfred Kazin called his special quality "combative innocence." Sinclair, wrote Kazin, represented "one of the last ties we have with that halcyon day when Marxists still sounded like Methodists."