AMERICAN NOVELIST, essayist, muckraker, and socialist economic reformer, Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Upton Beall and Priscilla (Harden) Sinclair. His father's alcoholism severely affected the family's stability and living conditions; his mother hated alcohol and caffeine. Sinclair began publishing dime novels when he was 15 (five years after the family moved to New York City), and while attending New York City College, he wrote pulp fiction to finance his education.

He enrolled at Columbia University in 1897, producing under pseudonyms in his spare time, the Clif Faraday and Mark Mallory, stories for boys' publications. Sinclair began reading the Appeal to[Page 747]Reason, a socialist-populist newspaper, and then joined the American Socialist Party when he was 24 years old.

Sinclair's most famous work and only bestseller, ...