The Chronicle of Higher Education is paying appropriate attention to the previously mentioned Upton Sinclair centenary with not one but two pieces on Sinclair. The first looks at the question of how The Jungle should be taught ...
Since historians are rarely trained in the fine points of literary analysis, literature professors are better equipped to explore the formal dimensions of The Jungle. They could compare Sinclair to Harriet Beecher Stowe, especially since Sinclair intended The Jungle as the Uncle Tom's Cabin of "wage slavery." They might trace the influence on Sinclair of the dime novel, knowing that he turned out reams of boys' adventure tales during his adolescence. They could, above all else, delve into close textual readings of its naturalism, aided perhaps by commentary such as Matthew J. Morris's "The Two Lives of Jurgis Rudkus," a brilliant analysis of allegory in the novel published in American Literary Realism in 1997.
Even history teachers, however, must treat The Jungle as a work of literature, not simply as a mirror of an economic, political, and social world. The Jungle should be studied not just for what it reveals about its time, but for the traces of its time upon it and its author. Our discussion of The Jungle should reach beyond its descriptive power to make its authorial assumptions explicit.
... and a second piece looks at the literary scandal that broke out in December when the Los Angeles Times reported that an Orange County lawyer, Paul Hegness, had bought a box of papers at an auction warehouse for $100 containing a letter from Upton Sinclair ...
On December 24, 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that an Orange County lawyer, Paul Hegness, had bought a box of papers at an auction warehouse for $100. Inside there was a letter postmarked September 12, 1929, in which Upton Sinclair confessed knowing that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were guilty. He'd been told so by the onetime defense lawyer for the two Italian anarchists who were tried for armed robbery and murder, then executed by the state of Massachusetts in 1927. The defense lawyer, Fred Moore, had let Sinclair in on it. Sinclair poured his guts out, admitting anguish over the ethical quandary of writing a book that could serve the "cause" of making Sacco and Vanzetti into martyrs.
It seemed like a smoking gun, an admission that Sinclair was willing to lie for politics. The letter constituted, the Los Angeles Times intoned, an "exposé."
But it comes as no surprise to anyone who has spent time, as I have, in the Sinclair archives at Indiana University's Lilly Library. Nor would it shock anyone who has bothered to read the book that Sinclair wrote about the casea two-volume "contemporary historical novel" called Boston.