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Upton Sinclair has never broken himself of the colonizing habit. He went to Single Tax colonies at Fairhope, Ala. and Arden, Del. In 1909 it was "Physical Culture City" at Battle Creek, Mich., a health centre run by Bernarr Macfadden. At Battle Creek, discontented Meta Sinclair met Poet Harry Kemp, with whom she eloped two years later. And at Battle Creek, Upton Sinclair met his second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough, daughter of a wealthy judge of Greenwood, Miss. When they were married in 1913, Judge Kimbrough, who had no more use for a Socialist than for a Republican, turned his daughter's picture to the wall.
Publisher. With his wife's financial assistance, Upton Sinclair moved to California in 1915 and set up his private publishing business. Publisher Sinclair now keeps an active list of 42 of his books, tracts, plays. He is often called the best selling U. S. author in Europe. The U. S. S. R. alone has bought some 3,000,000 copies of Sinclairiana. Indeed, Upton Sinclair still believes that a befuddled Nobel Prize Committee had him in mind when it gave the 1930 literature award to onetime Furnaceman Sinclair Lewis.
He has tried all the known diets to rid himself of nervous dyspepsia: vegetarian, raw meat, raw vegetables, nuts. milk. But he could probably subsist on publicity alone. It is meat and drink to him. He is not much of a businessman. In one breath he says that his publishing business brings him in more than the $10,000 salary of California's Governor. In the next he swears he has less than $150 in the bank. Fact is, the Sinclairs are still floundering in insolvency as a result of financing Director Sergei Eisenstein's Thunder Over Mexico, Upton's last interest before founding EPIC.
Man. To be a national sensation once more is felicity's zenith for Upton Sinclair, a fact which neither his enemies nor his friends have properly assayed. He is not a crackpot, but he is inordinately vain. He has not made a livelihood of scandalmongering; he has written because he was hurt. He is not an atheist; he is disgusted by commercialized religion. He is "not a "free-love"' cultist; he is an ascetic. His soft manners, his kindly eye, his intense, humorless and uncritical idealism, his obsession with the struggle of Labor and Capital for the fruits of Industry mark him for the archetype of old-fashioned Socialist. Yet the Socialists have outgrown him and Grade A radicals believe that if EPIC is given a trial, its failure will set U. S. radicalism back 50 years.
*Of these it is estimated that 125,000 are native-born lowans alone.