Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago's meatpacking district in 1904, boarding with immigrant workers and taking careful notes on everything he witnessed. The novel he built from that material, The Jungle, described rats ground into sausage, tubercular cattle sold as beef, and workers who fell into rendering vats and were shipped out as lard. He wrote it as an exposé of the exploitation of immigrant labor. Americans responded to the food. "I aimed at the public's heart," Sinclair wrote afterward, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

The Jungle, published in 1906, triggered a wave of public revulsion that contributed directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act — two landmark pieces of legislation Theodore Roosevelt signed the same year. The irony was not lost on Sinclair: the reforms addressed the contamination that repelled middle-class consumers while doing almost nothing for the immigrant workers whose suffering had been his actual subject. He spent the rest of his career trying, with varying success, to aim more accurately.

Sinclair went on to write nearly 90 books and remained a committed socialist throughout his long life. He ran for governor of California in 1934 on the EPIC platform — "End Poverty in California" — and came close enough to winning that his opponents pioneered modern campaign dirty tricks to stop him, producing fabricated newsreels and planting false stories in the press. His 1943 novel Dragon's Teeth, part of the Lanny Budd series, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.