The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

All through my seventy-one years of writing life--I started at thirteen--I have had from my readers suggestions that I should tell my own story. When I was halfway through those...

After I had taken up my residence in Pasadena, he made a tour of the country to become acquainted with the agents of his company; he gave a banquet to those in southern Californ...

One feature of our school was the assembly room, into which we marched by classes to the music of a piano, thumped by a large dark lady with a budding mustache. We sang patrioti...

The story as I recall it is this. Savage had a friend who set out for Ireland in the days before the cable; at midnight Savage awakened and saw his friend standing by his bedsid...

I would get a cab and take him--no longer home, for we could not handle him; he would be delirious, and there would be need of strong-armed attendants and leather straps and iro...

This experience, repeated, made me more of a solitary than ever. I wanted to be free to behave like a lunatic, and yet not have anybody think me one. I remember a highly embarra...

At this election I was one of a group of Columbia students who volunteered as watchers in the interests of the reform ticket. I was assigned to a polling place over on the East...

Thyrsis had only ten or fifteen dollars, but was wealthy in the certain future of his masterpiece. So the young couple went to the study of the Reverend Minot J. Savage at the C...

So now the firm of D. Appleton and Company was interested in the diary of this suicide. Their literary adviser was Ripley Hitchcock. He happened to be in the Adirondacks and we...

Let me say at once that I have no idea of blaming my relatives. They were always kind to me; their homes were open to me, and when I came, I was a member of the family. Nor do I...

I remember being invited to Hull House to dinner and sitting next to the saintly Jane Addams. I got into an argument with her consecrated band, and upheld my contention that the...

Roosevelt’s commissioners asked me to go to Chicago with them; but I have never cared to repeat any work once completed. I offered to send a representative to put the commission...

There were Professor William Noyes, of Teacher’s College, and his wife, Anna, who afterward conducted a private school. There were Edwin Björkman, critic, and translator of Stri...

Mike is working on his autobiographical novel--it was published under the title of _The High Romance_. I am writing _The Millennium_, a play, and we write our health book togeth...

My rest came to an end, because a stock company in San Francisco proposed to put on my dramatization of _Prince Hagen_, and the newspaper reporters came and wrote up my “squirre...

_The Naturewoman_, like all my plays, had no success. It was published in the volume _Plays of Protest_ a couple of years later, and had no sale. Not long thereafter, the studen...

Corydon went to New York, to the apartment of her mother and father, which was vacant in the summer. Harry followed her; and then came Thyrsis, and the great divorce scandal bur...

The _Gute Kinder_ took their guests driving to see the sights of Berlin, including the monstrous statues of the Sieges Allee. Thyrsis thought he had never seen anything so funny...

It was Mary Craig who had provided me with the picture of that august Harvard senior, named Van Tuiver in the novel. What had happened was this. In my little cottage in the sing...

My aim that winter was to write a novel called _King Coal_, dealing with those labor camps in the Rocky Mountains about which I had learned so much. The first essential for my w...

The checks brought one amusing development before long: the president of Pasadena’s biggest bank invited Mrs. Gartz to remove her account from his institution. Whether that had...

I charge, and I intend to prove in court, that you are carrying out the conspiracy of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association to smash the harbor strike by brutal defiance...

For my story I needed to know not merely the Italian laborers, who were easy to meet, but the aristocrats, who were difficult. Soon after my arrival, still on a crutch, I read t...

In Professor Schorer’s huge tome you may read the whole pitiful story of American “social drinking” as it affected the life of one man of genius. You may read about the parties...

And, meanwhile, Eisenstein was in Chapala, shooting white pelicans, gray pumas, and Nayaritan damsels paddling dugouts in mangrove swamps. He was in Cholula, shooting Catholic c...

No words could describe the fury of that campaign in its last days. I was told of incidents after it was over. A high-school girl of Beverly Hills told me of being invited to th...

Because I had known Ford, I was much interested in what was going on; as usual, I decided to make a novel of it. I called the book _Flivver King_, and when it was done I sent a...

And then another light novel: What would happen if a modern man suddenly found himself with the power to work miracles--miracles like those in the Testaments both New and Old? H...

_Cicero_ ran for about six weeks, and Dick Otto lost his ten thousand dollars. I lost the advance paid to me, which I had put back as an investment. Dick was sorry about the pla...

The clergyman had agreed that only members of the family and half a dozen invited friends were to be admitted: the Armours, of course, and the Sol Lessers, and the Richard Ottos...

Kimbrough, Mary Craig (Mrs. Upton Sinclair, his 2d wife), 184, 186, 193, 194, 195-96, 204-11 _passim_, 224, 251, 254, 259, 263-65, 277, 279, 281, 286, 293, 307, 309 and Corydon,...