Upton Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, the only child of a poor liquor salesman and his wife. He attended both the College of the City of New York and Columbia University. In 1906, Sinclair published The Jungle, a muckraking exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking district. An immediate bestseller, it prompted widespread public outrage and led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. An ardent socialist and political activist, Sinclair ran for office several times. His large body of work includes the novels King Coal (1917), The Brass Check (1919), and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Dragon’s Teeth (1942). He died on November 25, 1968, in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Kenneth W. Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism?(1993), So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism?(2003), and What Was African American Literature??(2011).

Upton Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, the only child of a poor liquor salesman and his wife. He attended both the College of the City of New York and Columbia University. In 1906, Sinclair published The Jungle, a muckraking exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking district. An immediate bestseller, it prompted widespread public outrage and led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. An ardent socialist and political activist, Sinclair ran for office several times. His large body of work includes the novels King Coal (1917), The Brass Check (1919), and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Dragon’s Teeth (1942). He died on November 25, 1968, in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Kenneth W. Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism?(1993), So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism?(2003), and What Was African American Literature??(2011).