Upton Sinclair (1878) was one of the greatest contemporary writers in the United States. R. in Baltimore. The writer’s father was not a particularly successful businessman, who, according to S., “had hated the modern business world from an old-fashioned aristocratic point of view” (“Trials of Love”) and failed to make a fortune. Distinguished by extraordinary abilities, S. graduated early from school. At the age of 15, he began to earn literary work: he made jokes and jokes, which he sold to newspapers and humorous magazines. Later, the publishers of the cheap 5-cent Street and Smies library hired him to write novels for teenage readers. This period of S.’s “literary” activity was distinguished by extraordinary fertility, since the author dictated to the stenographer for several hours daily his novels about the adventures and adventures of young heroes in the prairies, on the island of Cuba, etc. Thanks to this method, by the age of 20, the volume of his works was equal to the collection of the works of some hardworking writer who worked a lifetime. At the same time, S. took a course of study in college.
In 1899 he left his studies, went to Quebec and began to create his first real novel Springtime and Harvest, reprinted in 1901 under the title King Midas. This is reflected in the feeling of contradictions of capitalist reality. His protest, however, is still idealistic, which is generally characteristic of the entire early period of his work. The same conflict between the ideal aspirations of the individual and reality is the subject of C.’s second book, The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903). In this work, as in the next one, Prince Hagen (Prince Hagen, 1903), this conflict is resolved in the direction of a retreat, a renunciation of reality in the name of an ideal. Manassas (1904) marks the beginning of the search for new ways. Here S. refers to the historical plot – the civil war between North and South – and if he does not offer active intervention in the life struggle in the image of his main character Allan Montagu, then in any case he does not run away from reality into the realm of the ideal. In the mind of the writer gradually made a change. In 1904 we already met him in the ranks of the organizers of the Socialist Society of United Secondary Educational Institutions.
In 1905, in the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, a novel from the life of the Chicago workers, which created the writer world fame, The Jungle (Jungle, published in 1906), was printed from number to number. This novel marked the turn of the writer to realistic creativity, the desire to find a way out of the contradictions of reality in it itself. However, if S. was able in this work to expose the horrors of capitalist exploitation and to show the dark machinations of businessmen, if he found creative forces in himself to show the images of workers, which evoked deep sympathy of the reader, then he could not here create artistically convincing images of proletarian fighters.
The following novels The Metropolis (1907) and The Moneychangers (1908), devoted to the first to criticize the life of the “big world” of New York and the second to describe the morals of the exchange, are artistically low, although they made an impression of sensation due to the facts and revelations contained in them. If in these two novels artistic penetration into the inner stimuli of the behavior of the characters is absent, then the next two works are an attempt to deep psychological substantiation of the social evolution of the characters. In Samuel the Seeker (Samuel the Seeker, 1910) and Love’s Pilgrimage (The Trial of Love, 1911), S. reveals the effect of the horrors of everyday reality on the feelings and consciousness of the intellectual heroes (Samuel in the novel of the same name and Tirsis in The Trial of Love) who come to socialism. At the same time, it is very characteristic, as critics pointed out, that S. cuts off his narrative just when he leads his hero to socialism.
The novels Sylvia (Sylvia, 1913) and Sylvia’s marriage (The Marriage of Sylvia, 1914) continue the line of deepening into psychological analysis and represent a temporary departure from social themes to family and household problems.
He returned to social themes in 1917, when he published a novel devoted to the description of the life and life of coal miners, King Coal. However, even bourgeois-liberal criticism noted that by placing the "young aristocrat" in the center of action, S. "overshadows the main question - the question of the struggle of the working class." His next major work, Jimmy Higgins (1919), is a vivid artistic document reflecting the international influence of the October Socialist Revolution. The hero of the novel – a simple worker, a member of the socialist party – goes to the north of Russia, to Arkhangelsk, to fight in the ranks of the army of American interventionists against the young Soviet Republic. Here he learns the truth about the Bolsheviks and begins to help them in propaganda among the soldiers. In the end, Jimmy, tortured, loses his mind.
100%. The story of a patriot (100 percent, 1920) is the opposite type of worker, who becomes a spy and a provocateur. In 1920 he began publishing a series of pamphlets devoted to the exposure of the bourgeois press, the system of education, and other aspects of the life of capitalist America: The brass check (Bronze stamp, 1919), The goose step (Goose Step, 1922), and The goslings (Gusyata, 1924). To the same type of pamphlets belong “The Mammonart” (The Art of Mammon, 1925) and “Money Writers!” (Money Writes! 1927), which are experiments vulgar-sociological essentially analysis of the “influence of economics on literature” (subtitle to “Money Writers!”). His last major works—Oil (1927) and Boston (1928)—are devoted to Sacco and Vanzetti. The production of subsequent years (Roman Holyday, 1931, etc.) is artistically and socially low.
V. I. Lenin wrote about S.: “Sinckler is a socialist of feeling, without theoretical education” (V. XVIII, pp. 141). Sinclair is naive because he ignores the half-century (written in 1915) development of mass socialism, the struggle of currents in it, ignores the conditions for the growth of revolutionary actions in the presence of an objective revolutionary situation and revolutionary organization. You can't replace that with "feeling." The harsh and merciless struggle of powerful currents in socialism, opportunist and revolutionary, cannot be avoided with rhetoric” (ibid., p. 142).
This characterization reveals the very essence of "socialism" S. and his worldview in general. Reflecting the spontaneous protest of the petty-bourgeois masses, he embarked on the path of exposing the horrors of capitalist reality. However, ignoring "mass socialism," "the struggle of currents in it," etc., led to the fact that, for all the sincerity of his humanism, socialism could never finally adopt a consistently revolutionary point of view. “Socialism of Sense” played a bad joke with S. already during the World War. If at first (at the time Lenin wrote about him, in 1915) he spoke as a pacifist against the war, then later he became a supporter of the US action on the side of the Entente. The writer’s repeated vacillations in one direction or another are explained by the petty-bourgeois nature of this “socialism.”
S. is characterized by the denial of the revolutionary path of social reorganization. As early as 1907, in his book The Industrial Republic, S. expressed his understanding of how the revolution in the United States should take place, which he expected in 10 years: he predicted the onset of an industrial crisis, a hunger campaign of the unemployed on Washington, a general panic and, finally, a peaceful and bloodless revolution. “My work has always been to ensure that America avoids violent revolution” (Bronzemark, 1919). He still holds this position (see Upton Sinclair on Camrade Kautsky, 1931).
If, on the one hand, socialism takes the path of vulgar sociological explanation by the direct influence of the economy of such superstructures as art, on the other hand, it is characteristic of it that it replaces the economic factors of development with ideal ones. The only constant factors in all kinds of change are the needs of humanity: justice, brotherhood, wisdom. “I truly believe in truth and in its power to overcome error.” Proceeding from this, he expressed his conviction as early as 1907 that “a resolute man devoted to the abolition of class rule” (the Republic of Labor) would emerge who would carry out the social reconstruction of the world through a bloodless, non-violent revolution. Remaining on this view and desperate to find such a man, S. recently decided to try the role himself. He joined the Democratic Party, ran for gubernatorial office in California, and released his own program of bloodless revolution (The Epic Plan for California, 1934). While remaining subjectively as honest a “socialist of feeling,” S., however, objectively plays a negative role, for his demagogic program only hinders the growth of the class consciousness of the proletariat; objectively, it rather plays a hand against those who preach fascism in the United States. Its further political evolution is difficult to predict, precisely because of the vacillations characteristic of him as a “socialist of feeling.”
The specific features of Sinclair’s worldview strongly affected his work. As an artist, S. exhibits a characteristic hesitation: “Throughout his work, two principles are struggling in him... idealism and realism.”
All the best, most socially significant works in the time of writing coincide (and not accidentally) with periods of social upheaval and conflict (the rise of the labor movement in the early XX century. – “Jungle”; the end of the war and the proletarian revolution in Russia – “King Coal”, “Jimmy Higgens”, the Sacco process and Vanzetti – “Boston”).
Another feature of S. is a tendency to psychologism. He often confines himself to depicting the process of the transition of his heroes to certain socio-political views, without showing their further fate, their further actions.
The rhetoric noted by Lenin in his journalistic works repeatedly makes itself felt in the writer’s works of art. Socialism is realistic when it shows certain negative aspects of capitalist reality, but its social ideal and the ways of achieving it are drawn in utopian terms. Therefore, he is forced to appeal to the sense and reason of his readers. Hence the inevitable deviation from realism towards rhetoric and pathetics. In addition to the writer himself, who invades the content and distorts the normal course of events for the sake of his concept, the bearers of these elements of rhetoric and pathetics are the positive heroes of S., who very often act as “mouthpieces” of the author’s ideas, which deprives their images of artistic persuasiveness.
Despite all the noted shortcomings, S.’s best social novels (Jungle, King Coal, Jimmy Higgins, Oil, Boston, and some others) played a positive role in their time and largely retain their significance to the present day, mainly from the point of view of exposing the “conditions of human existence” in a society where capital reigns.