ISSUE DATE: Oct. 22, 1934
THE BUZZ:
One night Sinclair awakened to find his wife sitting up in bed getting ready to shoot herself through the head with a pistol. In such an atmosphere was born the author’s impression of Princeton in The Goose-step. Manassas, the author’s fourth book, was no more successful than the first three. Then for the first time in his life Upton Sinclair had a little luck. He got a publisher to send him out to Chicago to investigate working conditions in the packing industry. The result was The Jungle, the biggest literary bomb burst since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sinclair made $30,000, a huge name for himself as a muckraker. President Theodore Roosevelt wanted him on the commission which laid the groundwork for the Meat Packing Law of 1907. Sinclair refused, but kept the pot boiling to such a pitch in magazine articles that President Roosevelt testily wrote Sinclair’s publishers to “tell Sinclair to go home and let me run the country for a while.”
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