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Influences On Upton Sinclair's Life

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Upton Sinclair was an only child born on September 20, 1878. He was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Even though his name was respected in the South from his great-grandfathers fame in the War of 1812, Upton Sinclair grew up in a family without much money. Any profit his father made was spent on alcohol. Living in poverty, the family moved often, unable to pay rent. Upton Sinclair became close to his mother, due to his father always being away or drunk. Upton Sinclair's mother, Priscilla, gave him the ability to fulfill the need to read. Reading books was how Sinclair spent most of his time, and he would often spend entire days reading. At the age of 8, he and his family moved to New York City. He didn't start schooling till around the age of 11, but excelled in his classes to catch up with the other kids his age. Sinclair started writing while still attending school. He wrote jokes and puzzles that were placed in children's magazines. The income he received from this allowed him to get his own apartment. He attended the City College of New York where he studied law. After deciding against a career in law, Sinclair …show more content…

Upton Sinclair was influenced by Socialism, and found the ways of American capitalism destructive. Many of his articles he wrote were published in a Socialist weekly. To explore more opportunities in writing, Sinclair moved to Chicago, Illinois. In Chicago he was influenced into writing his novel, The Jungle, due to the working conditions he observed in the packinghouse district. Upton Sinclair stayed in Chicago for 7 weeks, and was showed around the stockyards by workers who helped him in his research. They often sat down with him at night to tell him stories of their experiences, "'I sat at night in the homes of the workers, foreign born and native, and they told me their stories, one after one, and I made notes'" (Coodley

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Innocent Belief Famously known for his novel, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair changed American life in the early 1900s without a doubt through his literature. However, many don’t realize that Sinclair reformed American life in more than one instance, through more than one book. At times, he even reached beyond his realm of literature to discuss other needed adjustments. Besides the serendipitous changes he created for the meat packaging industry, Sinclair’s other actions throughout his life are, subjectively, important to American history, according to Anthony Arthur. In his biography, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Arthur reveals his bias towards Sinclair, while supplying a relevant nature to his writing across an in-depth review of Sinclair’s

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Some significant reforms in the 1900s were the homes families and strangers lived in going from slums to nicer living conditions. For example living in an apartment that is meant for 1 maybe 2 adults has 10 to 15 adults living in it with a bathroom down the hall away from the rooms for people in other apartments to use as well, or when someone gets a sickness in the apartment and everyone in the whole building gets it because everything is contaminated from the person being sick. It went from that to a little bit bigger homes with lesser people and cleaner rooms and bathrooms. Upton Sinclairs was an activist because he took part in what he thought was right when it came to meet packaging and how it needs to be reformed and cleaned. And if

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The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair was an expose on the life of those who lived in Packingtown, Chicago. Packingtown was where most of the people who was looking for work lived, it was a very crowded city. Job openings were scarce and most of the jobs were very unsafe. Most of the people in this part of town were poor, so they did not really have much doubts of food,. The Jungle exposed the horrific work conditions, the poor food quality, and the deceitfulness of the business owners.

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He gained an early interest in the military as well. He was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York on the day of October 27, 1858. His mother was Martha Bulloch Roosevelt and she was an American socialite. His father was Theodore Roosevelt Sr and he was an American businessman. Theodore also had private tutors that helped him through school.

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In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a fictional novel that depicted the working class’ lifestyle and working conditions in the American city of Chicago. It focused on the meat-packing industry of the 20th century and the capitalist elite achieving success through the manipulation of poor immigrants, corruption of the capitalist government, institutions and its exploits of the growing industrial American state. Though Sinclair’s novel received critical acclaim for its reveal of the poor environmental and health conditions of the meat-packing industry, was there an underlying ideology he sought to impose and if so was he successful in his attempt? The third-person narration of The Jungle, enables Upton Sinclair from making his argument

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What Sinclair meant was that he tried to get the people upset about the working conditions but instead, they worried about the contaminated food and then went to the government about it. The heart was supposed to be the immigrants, harsh conditions as well as the contaminated food but then he hit the stomach which was that unsettle “food”. He didn’t achieve his purpose which upset the stomach. That when they went to the authorities, they called for a reformation of the inspection policy. The people were too worried about what about they put into their body, instead of the workers that had the worse end.

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Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tension in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through his novel “The Jungle”. He used the story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, to show the harsh situation that immigrants had to face in the United States, the unsanitary and unsafe working conditions in the meatpacking plants, as well as the tension between the capitalism and socialism in the United States during the early 1900s. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrants move into the United States, and most of them were from Europe. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, like many other immigrants, have the “America Dream” which they believe America is heaven to them, where they can

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He was born January 12, 1706 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony now known as the present day Boston. His birthplace was then a british colony on 17 Milk Street. Ben grew up in a large family being the youngest son and the 15th child. Thanks to his parents, he

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Upton Sinclair, a novelist, writer, journalist, political activist, and politician, was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1878. Sinclair began college at the age of 14 at the City College of New York. Sinclair aspired to be a poet, but eventually followed a different route. He began working on literary works that would cause major reforms in society. In 1904, Sinclair spent seven weeks in disguise in Chicago’s meat packing district to research his novel, The Jungle.

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The Bosses squeezed and drained the life of those men. In the book The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair he described the life of a struggling family try to work and stay alive in the filth. The working conditions in the factories were unsafe, unsanitary and people made little. The purpose of this book was for people to become socialist other than capitalist.

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Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland in a small row house on September 20, 1878. In addition to this, from an early age he was exposed to differences that would have a long lasting effect on his juvenile mind and drastically influence his thinking as time progressed. Moreover, he was the only child to an alcoholic liquor salesman of a father, and a determined mother, he was raised on the premise of poverty, yet was also exposed to the advantages of the upper class through frequent gatherings with his mother’s wealthy family (biography.com). Equally important, is at the age of ten Sinclair’s father uprooted the family from Baltimore to New York City. During this time, Sinclair started to establish a sharp mind and was an insatiable

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Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. He was the only son of James Nathaniel Hughes. His Father was absent for most of his youth and did not want to have anything to do with black culture. Then Hughes was brought to his grandmothers, Mary Langston. Her house was in Lawrence, Kansas and his mother, Carrie lived with them.

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His father did not have recognizable wealth but past good moral values to him. His artistic capability started to show in his early stage of life and at the age of 13 years he had already written some work for his school publication(Fitzgerald,

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At a young age of thirteen he had to work at a bank to help his family. Then, he left the school at eighteen and became an elementary teacher for a short time. Also, he became a newspaper reporter before trying his luck sailing as a merchant to Liverpool, England. In the summer of 1839 he came

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Biography Bram Stoker was born on November 8th, 1847 in Dublin, Ireland. Originally named Abraham Stoker, he was the 3rd of seven children. As a child, he was often very ill. As a result, he read copious amounts of books and listened to scary tales his mother would orate to him. His mother was Charlotte Matilda Blake Thornley Stoker, and his father was Abraham Stoker.

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