Initially serialized in Appeal to Reason and then promoted by Doubleday's savvy publicist Isaac Marcosson, the hugely profitable The Jungle allowed Sinclair to undertake an experiment in communal living in Englewood, New Jersey, where he purchased Helicon Hall, a former boys' school. John Dewey was on the board of directors, Sinclair Lewis lived there briefly, and William James, Lincoln Steffens and Emma Goldman all dropped by. But the venture lasted less than a year because a fire of mysterious origins leveled the place. Sinclair then left his wife and son, and after a well-publicized divorce and a brutal account of the failed marriage in his novel Love's Pilgrimage (1911), he settled in California permanently with his second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough, in 1916. As Arthur succinctly notes, "Sinclair's comparative innocence concerning human psychology accounts for his limitations both as a literary artist and a young husband."

Indeed. Sinclair's "radical innocence" is the leitmotif of Arthur's book (hence its title): A man who hears only what he wants to hear, Sinclair is a babe in the woods when dealing with astute politicians like FDR, and he loses the gubernatorial election in California not just because the conservatives in the film industry, business interests in major cities, Republicans and the Los Angeles Times ranged themselves against him but because Democrats undermined the candidacy of one widely considered a "millennial ass."

Mattson, who tells the same story, also details the more adroit aspects of Sinclair's plan to end poverty in California (EPIC), which packaged progressive ideas--the call for self-managing farm and factory cooperatives, aided by the government--in a populist idiom that voters could understand. Impressed by Sinclair's political acumen and his prescience about the rise of Fascism, particularly in the historical novels Sinclair wrote from 1940 to 1948, Mattson considers him a proto-Ralph Nader partly responsible for the rise of the New Left, or at least its muckraking arm (although Sinclair supported the war in Vietnam and rejected third-party spoiling). To Mattson this was a man willing to fight for what he believed, in literature and in life, and whose life reveals "the possibilities and limitations of radical protest." Arthur basically agrees. "Sinclair was energetic, principled, and humane," he concludes elegiacally.

But for all their wistful, beseeching encomiums, these good and purposeful books will not, I'm afraid, revive much interest in Upton Sinclair. His resurrection ultimately belongs to Chris Bachelder's comic fusion of Mattson's representative Sinclair with Arthur's idiosyncratic one. Therein lies an insufferable, lovable and irrepressible believer in no real danger of dying:

I dreamed I saw Sinclair last night
Alive as you or me
Says I, 'Sinclair, you're ten times dead'
'I'm back again,' says he
'I'm back again,' says he.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.