Yes, I would like to receive periodic updates and information via e-mail from Commentary.

Recipient Addresses:

Separate each address with a comma.

Your E-mail Address: Message:

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), the author of 79 books, including the novel The Jungle (1906), the most celebrated muckraking work of its time and the only one widely read a century later, is enjoying something of a revival these days. It is not difficult to see why. Sinclair popularized the social-scientific ideas developed by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class, and Americanized Benjamin Disraeli’s notion of “Two Englands,” a phrase coined by the 19th-century English novelist and political genius to describe the division between rich and poor. In the manner of Disraeli, Sinclair wrote unceasingly of two Americas, a disgrace to the national ideals of freedom and equality. This theme has enjoyed a long life, surfacing most recently in the high rhetorical dudgeon of John Edwards in his campaign for the presidency and cropping up in the fulminations of other candidates against the evils of Exxon and Halliburton. It thus hardly seems coincidental that, in 2006, the centenary year of The Jungle, two biographies of Sinclair should have appeared: Radical Innocent,1 by Anthony Arthur, a professor emeritus at California State University at North-ridge, and Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century,2 by Kevin Mattson, who teaches history at Ohio University and is a regular contributor to the left-wing magazines Dissent and the Nation.

---

© 2009 Commentary Inc.