Abstract
Surprisingly, this new biography of the much-studied Upton Sinclair actually breaks new ground. Though it is not evident from either the title or the subtitle, Coodley illuminates an important aspect of Sinclair’s life that has been nearly completely ignored or brushed off in previous scholarship: his commitment to feminism and equality for women. Coodley also discusses in a full and engaging manner how Sinclair struggled to integrate his ideas on the proper way to live one’s life into his writing, lecturing, and political activism.
Sinclair was an easy target for his contemporary enemies, both conservative and liberal, to make fun of. But his impact has outlasted that of nearly all those who laughed at him. This book is a good example of a critical but still positive biography of a figure whose writings and ideas have remained in circulation for over 100 years, both here and abroad.
As the author of The Jungle, which has had new editions and commentary emerging every decade up to the present, Sinclair was no less a celebrity in his own time, though never a rich one. His interests ranged well beyond the stockyards of Jungle fame and included women’s rights, healthy food, environmentalism, liquor prohibition, cooperative living, socialism writ large, preventative health care, the labor movement in general and the lives of workers in particular, and all manner of political reform including a run for governor of California.
Sinclair was a serious researcher that many journalists and fiction writers could well emulate today. The core of his research came from talking to people who truly knew things, most often workers. He wrote novels; book-length nonfiction, usually exposés of some sort; magazine and newspaper articles; plays and screenplays; political essays; campaign propaganda; and thousands of letters. Amazingly, nearly all of them well bear rereading, even when he was wrong.
Coodley, with a lifetime of teaching working-class students in a community college in California, knows how to tell the story in a fresh and readable way. Her descriptions of how Sinclair was ridiculed as effeminate by the hyper-males of his lifetime might well ring true in more recent years. He outlived three wives and was a far from perfect husband, but as he said himself near the end of his life, “If I was not always right, I was always looking for the right. What more can a man do with his life?”
One of the key values of this book for labor educators is that it can help students see the person behind one of the most famous books ever written about U.S. workers. It could easily provide the basis for an interesting discussion or lecture by an instructor if there is not time to fit the book itself into a reading list. It also shows the writer as worker—in this case a celebrated one, but definitely a worker—who is practicing a craft to make a living, with all the problems and contradictions that entails for all workers with skills. Finally, the book is just a great story, well told, better than any fiction in some ways because no one could possibly make up such a rich and complicated life.