(7 of 8)
that of a 'poor
relation.' It had been my fate from earliest childhood to live in the
presence of wealth which belonged to others." The family moved to
Manhattan, where Upton put himself through Columbia as a special
student by writing boys' adventure stories for the pulp magazines
under the names of "Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, U. S.
A." and "Ensign Clarke Fitch, U. S. N." In 1900, when he
was 22, he married Meta Fuller, whose father was a newspaperman, whose
mother was an old friend of Mrs. Sinclair's. They had a baby at once
but the parents separated them until Upton could make enough to support
his wife. Not until 1903 did the young Sinclairs set up
housekeeping—in a tent in a grove of trees outside Princeton, N. J.
They had a $1-a-day subsidy from a Socialist friend to keep them alive
until Sinclair wrote the first of his unfinished Civil War trilogy,
Manassas. They lived there three and a half years. The winters were
bitter. In the summer there were mosquitoes. It was a wretched, lonely
life for Meta. Since another baby would be disastrous, they had agreed
to live like "brother and sister." One night Sinclair
awakened to find his wife sitting up in bed getting ready to shoot
herself through the head with a pistol. In such an atmosphere was born
the author's impression of Princeton in The Goose-step. Manassas, the
author's fourth book, was no more successful than the first three. Then
for the first time in his life Upton Sinclair had a little luck. He got
a publisher to send him out to Chicago to investigate working
conditions in the packing industry. The result was The Jungle, the
biggest literary bomb burst since Uncle Tom's Cabin. Sinclair made
$30,000, a huge name for himself as a muckraker. President Theodore
Roosevelt wanted him on the commission which laid the groundwork for
the Meat Packing Law of 1907. Sinclair refused, but kept the pot
boiling to such a pitch in magazine articles that President Roosevelt
testily wrote Sinclair's publishers to "tell Sinclair to go home and
let me run the country for a while."
Colonist. No sooner had Upton Sinclair pocketed his profits than he
embarked on his first Utopia, the Helicon Hall Colony. Site was an
expensive Mission-type building at Englewood, N. J. above the Hudson,
which had been erected for a boys' school. Radical literary folk were
welcomed, the idea behind the establishment being bonhomie and
laissez faire. Sinclair Lewis went down from Yale to tend the furnace.
Englewood, then as now a tycoons' home ground, took an instant dislike
to the Helicon Hallers and their host, who used to go around the town
in old corduroys, flannel shirt and sandals. The place burned down one
March night in 1907, killing a drunken carpenter. An arson charge was
brought against Sinclair, but subsequently dropped. And the New York
Press inspired Sinclair's The Brass Check, when it developed the yarn
that Helicon Hall had been a "free-love" colony.
