Chapter I: Preliminary Explanations

I.

Americans generally are truly surprised and puzzled by Upton Sinclair’s fame abroad--by the fact that he seems to be regarded throughout the world as his country’s most distinguished literary figure.... So great is the discrepancy between his position in the world at large and his position in his own country, that a book about him may as well begin by offering some explanation, to bewildered American readers, of his world fame.

The gist of the matter seems to lie in this:

Modern industrial America is a new portent in an old world; and the world has looked to American literature for realistic description and intellectual interpretation of it--and has found these things chiefly and best in the writings of Upton Sinclair. Other American writers of our time may be more acute psychologists, wiser in the lore of human nature, more able to analyze and dramatize the traditional passions of mankind. But in our American literature generally there is no such account--at once emotionally and objectively convincing--of what America is in its most characteristic contemporary aspects, as may be found in the novels and pamphlets of Upton Sinclair. And this very simply explains the fact of Sinclair’s special eminence in the eyes of the world among American writers of this period.

From this point of view, then, it may roughly be said that, as an expositor of modern industrial America, Sinclair takes rank with Cooper, who put the America of the Indian and the pioneer on the literary map of the world; with Mark Twain and (in so far as a prose writer may be compared to a poet) with Walt Whitman--each of whom, in his time, described and interpreted to the world a significant epoch of American life.

These are strictly literary considerations; another consideration, not purely literary (at least not from the American point of view) is also involved in the great respect which Sinclair enjoys abroad. The Voltairean tradition of the literary man as a fighter against wrong, a champion of the oppressed, still survives in Europe. It is not an offense against good taste (as it would be in our politer American literary world) for such writers as Zola and Anatole France to take sides in a Dreyfus case. And when they hear abroad that the author of _The Jungle_ has been arrested in New York City for “picketing” the offices of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., as a protest against the treatment of miners in Colorado, or that he has been arrested in California for reading the Constitution of the United States in public in a “free-speech fight”, they do not regard it as an unliterary eccentricity, but as a kind of heroism appropriate to a profession which has not abandoned its pretensions to courage.

II.

These preliminary pages may also serve to explain, to readers abroad, some of the reasons for the failure of America to accord Sinclair the rank to which it would seem that he is entitled by his achievements. An obvious reason, of course, is that he interprets American life in terms of a “class struggle” which is, as yet, alien to the idealistic conceptions of the American intelligentsia in general. More will be said on this point later. But there are, at the present moment, other psychological obstacles in the way of a general recognition of Sinclair in America.

One of these is his temperamental attitude toward life. He is recognized as being fundamentally a Puritan; and Puritanism (for reasons to be gone into at length later on) is just now very unpopular among the American intelligentsia. Sinclair has, indeed, by virtue of his passionate realism, his poetic and epic vision, and his critical and revolutionary thought, far transcended in his writings the limitations of the Puritan point of view. Yet it is perceptible at times, and to Americans in revolt against Puritanism it counts heavily against him.

Again, his attitude toward our machine civilization is one which Americans find it difficult to understand--since it is neither the popular one of uncritical adulation, nor the aristocratic one of reactionary sentimental protest against the machine age as such. Both these literary attitudes are well understood in America; but that a writer may be an idealist, and yet be a cordial believer in this modern machine civilization of ours, founding all his hopes for ultimate justice and beauty and happiness upon machinery’s essential and revolutionary possibilities, is still to the American mind a paradox.

III.

Nevertheless, there are unmistakable signs in recent American criticism of a growing respect for Upton Sinclair. Time’s perspective has given a new dignity to the gallant literary movement with which his name is associated. It is remembered that Europe’s greatest critic, Georg Brandes, once said: “I find three present-day American novelists worth reading--Frank Norris, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.” The literary movement of which these men were the leaders came (for reasons to be recounted later) upon evil days, and seemed to end in discouragement and chagrin. But now that it has very recently been revived in the hands of younger writers, it is remembered that during that long interval Sinclair remained its single unfaltering and powerful voice. He can now be seen as a representative pioneer figure of an ambitious interpretive effort of which the culmination is still to come in the American literature of the future.

Of so much honor, in his own country, this prophet is now assured. And it is certain that, as the kind of literature comes into its own which Frank Norris, Jack London and Upton Sinclair first showed us how to write in America, his literary stature will, like theirs, increase in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen. We shall know that he was of the race of giants, and forgive him those faults which we perceive to-day.

Meanwhile, his faults as well as his virtues will receive due attention in this little book. But it may as well be said frankly that they will be dealt with as the faults of a great writer, and analyzed with the respect due to him as such. It should also be remarked that the biographical details in these pages are intended to be subordinate to the critical study of his development as a certain kind of writer--a describer, critic and prophet of modern industrial America.