Курс жумысы Пән: Тили уйренилип атырган мамлекетлер адебияты тарийхы Топар

2.6 Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Upton Sinclair was born in 1878 to a family that stemmed from the Virginia planters aristocracy. One of his great grandfathers was a hero of the American Revolution, who also fought in the War of 1812 and contributed to the creation of the naval academy at Annapolis. Other family members were naval officers who fought on the side of the Confederacy (the army of the slaveholding South) during the Civil War. Despite this Southern upper-class background, Sinclair lived in conditions of genteel poverty. His father, a drunkard, was barely able to support the family financially. The resulting fear of proletarianization was a factor in Sinclair’s conversion to socialist politics. Sinclair’s family moved from Baltimore to New York, where the writer spent most of his childhood. He too his Bachelor of Arts degree at the City College of New York, and took a few graduate classes at Columbia University. Sinclair married Meta Fuller, but the match soon came apart.

At the time of his marriage, Sinclair was profoundly religious and idealistic, and advocated of form of art that was both aesthetically and morally oriented: artists, in this perspective, were supposed to redeem society. In the early years of the century, Sinclair started frequenting socialist intellectuals and journalists (George D. Herron, Fred d. Warren, Jack London, Ernest Poole, Charlotte Perkins Gilman). These new influences are the foundation of his first major literary achievement: the publication of The Jungle in 1906. Symptomatically, Jack London described the novel as “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of wage slavery, implying that Sinclair’s work had the capacity to shape the perception of industrial labor in the same way as Stowe’s denunciation of the exploitation of African Americans. With Jack London, Sinclair founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which was meant to propagate socialist culture. He set up a socialist commune—Helicon Hall—in New Jersey, and became a socialist candidate for Congress. These activities marked only the beginning of decades of commitment to progressive and left-wing causes.

Sinclair’s political evolution can be traced through his (prodigious) output, made up of novels reflecting the author’s changing views. He was at first in the mainstream of the American Socialist Party. Sinclair was one among the few party members who supported American intervention against Germany in the First World War. In the 1920s, he was a vocal defender of Sacco and Vanzetti, the two anarchists who would be executed on insufficient judicial evidence. In the 1930s, Sinclair organized a campaign to be elected governor of California. He party bore the name of End Poverty in California. This venture aroused vehement opposition in conservative circles. Movie studios, for instance, launched a vigorous propaganda campaign in order to block the left-wing movement (Sinclair mentions it, notably, in his book on William Fox). Sinclair won the Democratic primaries, but was defeated by a Republican Candidate. Yet his movement exerted a deep influence on the politics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democratic party: it encouraged the President to take a left-wing turn.

Having become a liberal (left-leaning progressive) by the late 1930s, Sinclair joined the anti-fascist Popular Front. Like many progressive American intellectuals, he was disappointed by the politics of Stalin’s Soviet Union, and became a staunch anti-communist after WWII. He died at the age of ninety in 1968 after having written an astounding number of texts—both fiction and nonfiction.

Sinclair’s Main Works. Sinclair’s output as a writer of fiction and nonfiction was immense. He literally never stopped writing from his teenage years to his old age. He was accordingly, according to a somewhat obsolete meaning of this term, a polygrapher. His works were at all times subjected to several kinds of influences, leading him to adopt various writing practices. Reviewing Sinclair’s work therefore gives one the impression of dealing with a plurality of writers.

- Dime-novel writing: Sinclair started his career by writing popular novels for boys (Cliff, the Naval Cadet [1903], for instance). Dime novels are popular romances with stereotypical heroes. Sinclair’s dime novels were often set in the context of military academies (West Point and Annapolis), a choice reflecting his family background).

- Fin-de-siècle aestheticism:

As a canonical writer, Sinclair first wrote novels influenced by the late-nineteenth-century aesthetic movement (John Ruskin, Walter Pater, William Morris). Springtime and Harvest (1901) is a very conventional sentimental novel about a clergyman’s daughter who must choose between marrying for money or for love. It is filled with overblown sentimental prose. Even more typical of the aesthetic movement is Prince Hagen: A Fantasy (1903): this work tells the story of an evil Prince who attempts to master the world. The events are narrated from the point of view of an idealistic poet who longs to cure mankind’s evils. At this stage of his carreer, Sinclair believed indeed that artists ought to be heroic prophets, ready to remedy the ills of the world through their moral example. His literary influences then were Jesus, Shakespeare, Emerson, and Shelley. The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903), the story of a poet and genius who killed himself, marked Sinclair’s farewell to this kind of literature.

- Popular naturalism: Under this label, Christopher Wilson designates those writers of the Progressive Era who, both in their fiction and their journalistic writings, set out to teach their contemporaries about the social problems of their time. We have seen that Theodore Roosevelt, President of the US in the 1900s called these writers the “m[e]n with the muck rake” (hence the terms “muckrakers”). Like George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells in England, these authors wrote works anchored in a period characterized by vivid debates about social and political ideas> Sinclair wrote in the “popular naturalist” idiom to the end of his career. Yet his various literary personas never canceled one another: his naturalist novels display the influence of aesthetic ideas and popular fiction.

Among the numerous novels penned by Sinclair, we may mention the following in addition to The Jungle: Manassas (1904) is a novel about the Civil War and its legacy. It introduces the character of Allan Montague, who appears in several of Sinclair’s novels. The novelist indeed chose to organize his works of serious fiction in cycles, centering on the same protagonist (Allan Montague, Lanny Budd). Montague in Manassas is a young Southerner who comes to realize the immorality of slavery.