Progressive era biography upton sinclair
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Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair was a famous novelist and social crusader from California, who pioneered the kind of journalism known as "muckraking." His best-known novel was "The Jungle" which was an expose of the appalling and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry. "The Jungle" was influential in obtaining passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Sinclair's interests ranged over a wide variety of topics, in his many books and articles. He would receive a Pulitzer Prize for a later novel about Hitler's rise to power. His contemporary, the writer Edmund Wilson, would say of him: "Practically alone among the American writers of his generation, [Sinclair] put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them."
The nomination of an avowed socialist to head the Democratic party ticket was more than the California establishment could tolerate. Sinclair's radical candi
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Management’s Gadfly: a critical biography approach to the work of Upton Sinclair
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the life and work, both fiction and nonfiction, of the American author Upton Sinclair, for the purposes of better understanding his impact on management theory and practice.
Design/methodology/approach
Critical biography is a historiographical approach that analyzes aspects of an individual’s life events and the context that surrounds those events to better understand the contributions of an individual. In this case, this paper analyzes Sinclair’s biography, his work-related fiction and nonfiction and his interactions with business leaders and management thinkers of the day, including scientific management founder Frederick Winslow Taylor, auto industry leader Henry Ford and safety razor magnate King Gillette.
Findings
This paper identified four themes which are related to management and workplace history that pervade his fiction and n
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When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906, the novel became an instant sensation, exposing the horrifying conditions in America’s meat-processing industry. With its stomach-turning depictions of the stockyards and slaughterhouses, the book lit a new fire under the pure food movement and inspired swift övergång of landmark food safety laws.
Two years earlier, in the fall of 1904, Sinclair had boarded a train to Chicago in search of material for his Great American Novel. For sju weeks, the 26-year-old writer and devout socialist investigated the dangerous and oppressive working conditions endured by what he called “the wage slaves of the Beef Trust.” Donning grimy clothes and carrying a dinner pail to sneak into Chicago’s “Packingtown,” a dense complex of stockyards, feed lots, slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants, Sinclair was horrified by what he saw.
Titled The Jungle as a metaphor for capitalism, Sinclair’s novel originally appeared in monthly installments between