By the time of his death in 1968, Upton Sinclair had published more than eighty books, won a Pulitzer Prize, nearly been elected governor of California, and established himself as perhaps the world's foremost pro ponent of democratic socialism. He had met with presidents from Theo dore Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson and been heralded as a great novelist by public figures as varied as Charlie Chaplin, Thomas Mann, and Al bert Einstein. Despite his remarkable literary output and his enormous influence during his lifetime, his novels have all but disappeared from academic discourse. The Jungle (1906) does remain widely taught in American high schools, and the centenary of its publication has resulted in two new Sinclair biographies. Moreover, the success of Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001) has renewed interest in The Jungle as an early call for changes in the meat industry. However, in all these circumstances Sinclair is treated primarily as a muckraking reporter who figured promi nently in Progressive Era reforms, and those few critics who do deal with him as a literary figure tend to have a low opinion of his work. For exam ple, William Bloodworth suggests that, although Sinclair was once con sidered an important American naturalist, today his novels seem" overly utilitarian, servants of causes now gone rather than explorations of uni versal problems"(157-58). Leon Harris echoes this complaint, suggest ing that while" great art... lasts," lesser art" eventually disappears from public view and interest"(1). Sinclair's art, in Harris's opinion, clearly belongs in the latter category.