King Coal (eBook / ePub)

Autoren-Porträt von Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state's ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism, and the eleven novels in Pulitzer Prize-winning Lanny Budd series.

Pressezitat

“King Coal is to the mining world what Sinclair’s The Jungle is to the meat-packing industry.” —Library Journal
 
Praise for Upton Sinclair
“When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to [Upton Sinclair’s] novels.” —George Bernard Shaw