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His parents came from the Southern gentry, and his father's family had a distinguished naval tradition stretching back to the American Revolution. His great-grandfather was Commodore Arthur Sinclair (died 1831), who had served in the War of 1812. His grandfather, Captain Arthur Sinclair, served first in the United States Navy then resigned to join the Confederate service.
The family fortunes had suffered after the Civil War, and so Upton Sinclair had an unusual upbringing that mixed wealth and poverty. His father was an alcoholic and his immediate family was poor, but he often stayed with his wealthy maternal relatives in New York, allowing him to experience two extremes of American society which later influenced his socialist views.
To pay his way through City College of New YorkCity College of New York was originally founded as the Free Academy of the City of New York in 1847. It was subsequently named the College of the City of New York but that name was later transferred to the complex of the municipally-owned colleges in New, Sinclair wrote jokes and fiction for magazines and newspapers, as well as dime novelIn the United States is the 19th century, a dime novel was a low-priced novel that could be purchased for a dime. The original dime novels were published in a tabloid format. The British English equivalent term was "penny dreadful. Dime novels and penny ds for the firm of Street & Smith. He also attended graduate school at ColumbiaColumbia University officially known as Columbia University in the City of New York is a private institution of higher education. It is one of the world's foremost research universities and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 under a royal charter.
After writing The Jungle, Sinclair invested nearly 30 percent of the proceeds into the Helicon Home for Jews Colony , a utopiaSee Utopia (disambiguation) for other meanings of this word Utopia in its most common and general meaning, refers to a hypothetical perfect society. It has also been used to describe actual communities founded in attempts to create such a society. The adjn society being set up in New JerseyNew Jersey is a state of the United States of America and has the U. postal abbreviation of NJ . The state is named after the island of Jersey in the English Channel. The USS New Jersey one of the most decorated vessels in the United States Navy, was name. Unfortunately, it burned down four months later.
He ran for Governor of CaliforniaArnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis with President George W. Bush ( 2003) The Governor of California is the highest executive authority in the state government, whose responsibilities include making yearly "State of the State" addresses to the California twice. The first time he ran as a SocialistThe Socialist Party of America is a socialist political party in the United States. It was formed in 1901 by a merger between the Social Democratic Party of Eugene V. Debs, formed three years earlier by veterans of the Pullman Strike of the American Railw candidate and garnered few votes. The second time, in 1934Events January-April January 1 Alcatraz becomes a federal prison. January 7 First Flash Gordon comic strip is published. January 10 Execution of Marinus van der Lubbe January 24 Einstein visits White House January 26 The Apollo Theater opens in Harlem, Ne, as a Democrat. This time around, during the depths of the Great Depression, he began a political movement that he hoped to both combat the effects of the Depression and use as a springboard to the governorship. That plan, known as EPIC (End Poverty in California), galvanized the support of the Democratic Party, and Sinclair gained its nomination. Conservatives in California were themselves galvanized by this, as they saw it as an attempted Communist takeover of their state and used massive political propaganda portraying Sinclair as a Communist. Sinclair was defeated in the election and largely abandoned EPIC and politics to return to writing.
He lived much of his life near Pasadena, California and later in Buckeye, Arizona, but near the end of his life he moved to Bound Brook, New Jersey. He was married three times.
The Upton Sinclair House, in Monrovia, California, is a National Historic Landmark.