Upton Sinclair

Biography

Baltown row-house smoke curled into the lungs of Upton Sinclair on 20 September 1878, a Baltimore birth that primed him to sniff out corruption wherever it hid. Ink became his first camera: he exposed Wall Street’s rigged roulette in The Money Changers (1920), revived a tarnished heroine in Maiden No More, and—four decades after his death—quietly supplied the gushing oil that Paul Thomas Anderson channelled into There Will Be Blood (2007). Between exposes he exchanged vows with three formidable Marys: Meta Fuller, Mary Elizabeth Hard Willis, and the crusading Mary Craig Sinclair. The muckraker’s heart finally clocked out on 25 November 1968 in Bound Brook, New Jersey, but the ink still hasn’t dried.