UPPIE REDUX?

A hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair, the muckraker and socialist, brought out "The Jungle," a sensationally grim expose of the noisome squalors and dangers of the meatpacking industry. Dedicated to "the workingmen of America," the book became an overnight best-seller. At the White House, Theodore Roosevelt, who had watched soldiers die from eating rotten meat during the Spanish-American War, wrote a three-page appreciation and critique of the novel, and sent it to Sinclair with an invitation to visit him. (Those were the days.) "The Jungle" played a major role in pushing forward the Pure Food and Drug Act, which Roosevelt had long favored, and which was passed in June of 1906, marking a major expansion of federal regulatory power. The book's influence hit the dinner table as well: after a couple of years, meat consumption declined, and it was widely believed that Sinclair's book was the cause. By common consent among literary historians, only one American novel, before or since--Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"--has had so powerful an influence on practical affairs.

In 1906, Upton Sinclair was twenty-seven years old; he continued publishing for more than sixty years, a clattering typewriter that would not stop. No two scholars seem to agree on exactly how many books he wrote, but the number is above ninety, and his output, in addition to social-protest and historical novels, includes plays, screenplays, tracts, journalistic exposes, didactic dialogues, instructional manuals, and autobiographies. Sinclair spoke at rallies, joined strikes and protests, and repeatedly ran for political office; he sponsored Sergei Eisenstein's epic unfinished documentary about Mexican Indians, "Que Viva Mexico." Ezra Pound, who knew a thing or two about obsession, said that Sinclair was not a maniac but a "polymaniac." During many periods of his life, Sinclair's activities were widely discussed in the press, and in the eyes of some prominent contemporaries, including Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Bernard Shaw, he was an invaluable guide to twentieth-century politics. To many people, however, he now seems remote and musty--the author of flaking volumes encountered in country book barns. Apart from "The Jungle," Sinclair's works have been largely forgotten, or perhaps simply mislaid, his name confused with that of Sinclair Lewis, the author of "Main Street," "Babbitt," and "Dodsworth."

Can anything in Sinclair's life and work still make a claim on us? At the moment, he's getting some of his old notice. Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia," is adapting Sinclair's novel "Oil!" into a movie starring Daniel Day Lewis and titled "There Will Be Blood" (with luck, the title will be changed again). The novelist Chris Bachelder recently brought out a fantasia, "U.S.!," in which Sinclair, resurrected by diehard leftists, writes one terrible novel after another and is repeatedly slain by reactionaries--a bizarrely masochistic scheme that nevertheless catches Sinclair's jack-in-the-box energy. Reading two new biographies of Sinclair--one intimate and intellectually astute, "Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair," by Anthony Arthur (Random House; $27.95), and one political and anecdotal, "Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century," by Kevin Mattson (John Wiley & Sons; $25.95)--leaves one bewildered by the contradictory nature of his enthusiasms, and by the mixture of prescience and credulity in his temperament. What fuses these qualities, one finally realizes, is his dedication to an ethical notion of being an American. He was one of those professional citizens--like William Jennings Bryan or H. L. Mencken or I. F. Stone--who took responsibility for the soul of the country but never (except for Bryan, briefly) held power. Through the years of America's century-long triumph, Sinclair was always mocking or scolding or keening for some unachievable national paradise. If he no longer seems original, it may be because he anticipated both our reforming high-mindedness and so many of our follies.

Sinclair was born in Baltimore in 1878, the son of a genteel and puritanical Southern woman and an alcoholic liquor salesman descended from a naval family. The combination of his mother's distaste for indulgence and his father's habit of lingering in bars--the young Upton was frequently dispatched to bring him home--appears to have left him with lifelong habits of industry and a sense of disgust for any behavior that suggested weakness. Moving to New York in 1888, the Sinclairs boarded at a residence hotel filled with other down-on-their-luck Southern families. Sinclair didn't waste much time at home; he entered City College at the age of thirteen and then transferred, as an eighteen-year-old graduate student, to Columbia, where he was generally bored in the classroom and spent his time writing stories and jokes for the pulp magazines published downtown. By the time he was ...