464 N Myrtle Ave
Monrovia, CA 91016, USA

Upton Sinclair House - National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance

Upton Sinclair was a leading member of the group of early twentieth century reformist writers and social critics which included such men as Thorsten Veblen and Max Eastman. His goal was not great literature so much as the advancement of certain ideas propounded creatively and powerfully in his novels, the best-known of which is perhaps The Jungle. Ultimately, he became one of the most influential American novelists in the area of social justice.

Seeking a more secluded home away from both the growing congestion of Pasadena, where he had lived since 1915, and A & disturbances of unwelcome guests which followed his California gubernatorial candidacy, Upton Sinclair. Purchased a home at nearby Monrovia in 1942. From that time until 1966, this was Sinclair's principal residence, although at intervals he and his wife fled to still more remote hideaways in the California mountains. In the spring of 1954, the Sinclair’s moved to Buckeye, Arizona, but Mrs. Sinclair's worsening health forced their return to Monrovia the following year. Living as recluses, the Sinclair’s stayed aloof from townspeople and from society at large. When a former friend, the Socialist Mrs. Kate Crane Gartz, brought the Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, the famous "Red Dean" of Canterbury Cathedral, to visit them, the fanatically anti-Communist Mrs. Sinclair locked the big wooden gates at the end of the driveway and refused the visitors admittance.

Of Monrovia, the last home of his active life, Sinclair observed that he found there "perfect peace to write in, a garden path to walk up and down on while I planned the next paragraph, and a good public library from which I could get what history books I needed."^ Virtually all of Sinclair's later works were written here, including most of the "Ejanny Budd" series, the third volume of which. The Dragon's Teeth^ received the Pulitzer Prize in 1942. Other works produced at Monrovia include Another Pamela C1950) and the temperance novel. The Cup of Fury C1956). His most famous works date, however, from a considerably earlier period.

Upton Sinclair was born on September 28, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, the scion of aristocratic forebears, although his immediate family was in straitened circumstances. His father, a liquor salesman, was an alcoholic, and consequently the family fortunes were subject to violent fluctuations. To this familial instability has been attributed, in part, Sinclair's later proletarian sympathies. In 1888, the Sinclair’s moved to New York, where Upton finished grammar school in two years and began attending the City College of New York at the age of fourteen. With characteristic energy and intensity, Sinclair wrote hack stories for pulp magazines as a student, and after the age of fifteen was able to support himself in this manner. He later worked his way through Columbia, University.

By 1900, Sinclair had sickened of the cheap sensationalism that kept him solvent, and he moved to the countryside near Princeton to do some serious writing. He married Meta Fuller the same year. The next six years were spent in grinding poverty, and the struggle to survive in an indifferent world while maintaining his literary integrity radicalized Sinclair. The influence of Wilshire's Magazine^ and his contact with the Socialist clergyman, George Herron, made of Sinclair an apostle of Socialism, which as one critic has observed, he embraced with religious fervor. Manassas^ Sinclair's first major novel, was a treatment of the Civil War from that perspective.

In 1906, two years after Manassas was published, Sinclair received an assignment from a Socialist magazine. Appeal to Reason^ to study and develop a report on the Chicago stockyards. From this experience came Sinclair's most famous work. The Jungle, the story of a Lithuanian immigrant family destroyed by the exploitation of the economic system. It chronicled in lurid detail the practices of the meatpacking industry and was an immediate popular success, although the public showed more concern with corrupted meat than with the plight of the worker. Nonetheless, the novel enriched Sinclair, brought him national fame, and led to the first Food and Drug Act.

The royalties from The Jungle were invested in Helicon Hall, a single-tax Socialist colony. Shortly after it was established however, fire destroyed the colony and Sinclair's investment. While he had a good income for the rest of his life, he usually spent his earnings on causes similar to the Helicon Hall experiment and was never financially secure.

He participated in several other Socialist colonies after the destruction of Helicon Hall, but this was a very difficult period of his life, one in which Sinclair suffered from the strain of divorce and nervous tension. However, one strong work emerged from these years. Entitled Love's Pilgrimage^ it appeared in 1911 and was autobiographical in character. The book contained in undeveloped form many of the themes which were to dominate his later work.

A series of ideologically-oriented exposes of American life began in 1918 with The Profits of Religion. These were propaganda works aimed at describing the effects of the economic system on various aspects of American society. The Brass Check (1919) dealt with the press. The Goosestep (1923) and The Goslings (1924) treated education, while Mammon art (1925) and Money Writes (1927) concentrated on the arts. Though not of great intrinsic merit, the series remains, as Walter F. Taylor has said, "the most noteworthy essay yet made in this country toward a complete Marxian interpretation of culture.... their very partisanship contributes to their power to stimulate and awaken.

Sinclair's next well-known work, Oil! (1927), is a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the milieu and values of the Harding Era and is considered one of his most well-written works in terms of character development and plot complexity.

By other avenues also, Sinclair pursued his idealistic aims for society. Between 1920 and 1930, he was a Socialist candidate for Congress and for Governor of California. Under the Democratic banner, he ran for governor again in 1936 on the famous EPIC platform—"End Poverty in California." Although his socialism had always been genteel and nondoctrinaire, Sinclair was subjected to an intensive smear campaign which branded him unjustly and eventually caused his defeat.

His last major literary effort, the "Lanny Budd" series, was begun in 1939 with World's Ends a socialist interpretation of history between the World Wars. The strong anti-Nazi flavor of several of the books made them extremely popular.

Innumerable causes involved Sinclair throughout his lifetime, including vegetarianism, prohibition, psychic experimentation, and civil liberties. He did not often succeed in fusing art with ideology, and much of his writing is fine propaganda and social criticism but simplistically- partisan literature. Yet his propaganda never wholly absorbed Sinclair the inquirer, the searcher for values, and he occupies a prominent place among modern American literary crusaders.

On November 25, 1968, he passed away at a nursing home in Bound Brook, New Jersey.