Upton Sinclair: California Socialist, Celebrity Intellectual by Lauren Coodley (review)

Few subjects present more obstacles to a biographer than Upton Sinclair. For one thing, Sinclair straddled the domains of journalism, fiction, and social activism almost effortlessly, requiring a biographer to immerse her or himself in these different fields. Additionally, Sinclair’s active career stretched from the 1890s to the early 1960s, which makes it daunting to provide any sort of substantive historical context for his life. To make matters still more challenging, the ground has been well covered: Sinclair himself wrote an autobiography, and biographers have been writing about Sinclair since 1927, and ranging up to historian Kevin Mattson’s brilliant study of Sinclair’s life, Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2006). The result is that Lauren Coodley’s biography of Upton Sinclair is, if nothing else, a tremendously ambitious undertaking. If the work itself is a flawed biography in many ways, Coodley nonetheless deserves praise for taking such a daunting subject and covering it 180 pages of text.

Coodley is an experienced writer and her prose is generally solid, clear, and easy to follow. She has a knack for writing narratives and, when she is involved in the telling of a story, the book is unquestionably at its best: nowhere is she more impressive than when she discusses the tumultuous encounter with Ogden Armour that convinced Frank Doubleday to publish Sinclair’s The Jungle, or the Hollywood studios’ efforts to destroy Sinclair’s End Poverty In California (epic) campaign for governor. These sorts of narratives lend themselves to her style, and they are definitely Coodley’s best passages.

She also has a couple of very interesting arguments. She takes the position throughout the text that the things that set Sinclair apart from other male writers and activists of the early 20th century – his devotion to monogamy and his emphasis on healthy eating (and support for temperance) – actually made him an activist ahead of his time, despite the fact that they made him the subject of ridicule during his own life. Sinclair’s devotion to monogamy, she suggests, made him particularly willing and able to work with women activists, which helped make him a more effective organizer. Equally important, Sinclair’s devotion to healthy eating, Coodley argues, not only influenced the slow food and organic food movements, but actually took those movements in a more clearly political direction, indicating that government regulation, not individual choice, should be behind food safety and nutrition. Buried in Coodley’s biography are the bones of a pair of fascinating articles on Sinclair’s views on each of these subjects, and a careful reader can read through the biography and be thoroughly convinced that, especially in these two regards, Sinclair was an exceptionally important activist.

Unfortunately these two important positions, and her ability to tell a good story, are buried beneath a number of serious flaws. Coodley’s efforts to cover Sinclair’s own writings are cursory at best – his novels are given only a paragraph or two’s worth of plot summary, with none of the lengthy analysis they might deserve. We are given a fair amount of discussion about the publication history of Oil, for instance, but next to nothing on its plot, despite Sinclair’s high opinion of his work. The same pattern holds true for other novels – Boston, his important novel about the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, receives a single line discussing its plot, where Coodley mentions that “his protagonist, Cornelia, deserts her aristocratic family to live with poor Italians, work in a factory, and walk a picket line.” (102) This is a surprising missed opportunity to get inside Sinclair’s mind, to investigate his thought process and worldview. The fact that women’s activism is so important to Coodley’s understanding of Sinclair makes this particular missed opportunity even more jarring. More details about Cornelia’s background and life could have greatly strengthened Coodley’s position on Sinclair.

Coodley’s rather cursory treatment of Sinclair’s work is not the only place where the biography...