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Upton Sinclair's Accomplishments Essay

1423 Words6 Pages

Though best known for his muckraking efforts that helped to end the Gilded Age, Upton Sinclair wrote nearly a hundred books in his lifetime. From a young age his mother encouraged in him a love of reading; when he could, Sinclair could be found reading for up to fourteen hours a day. However, his childhood was marked by poverty and his father's raging alcoholism. His mother took a strong sense of morality against his father’s drinking and of all types of sinning. These strict morals implanted in him made the socialist party very appealing. Sinclair was willing to make small sacrifices for the greater good, especially since he had seen how damaging poverty can be. This poverty, alcoholism, and eventually socialism led to Sinclair’s strong sense …show more content…

The public now trusted Sinclair, but he was able to use his newfound power as a muckraker to reveal corruptions in society and was able to help the common man's life to be a little easier. Through passage of bills such as the Pure Food and Drug Act, much of the New Deal legislations, and reform in many factories, Sinclair was effectively able to create a better society than the one he was born into. Sinclair’s childhood in poverty allowed him to empathize with regular workers, gave him motivation to help end poverty through politics, and even to continue his efforts after he gained some wealth and power. His sense of justice for the common worker and all those suffering due to poverty overarched many of his works and is seen even in many of his personal letters. After the publication of The Jungle, changes has been made to help protect citizens from diseased meat, but Sinclair still thought that more could be done to make the industry titans more reliable. He corresponded President Roosevelt with his concerns, “You must understand that the thing which I have called the ‘condemned meat industry’, is a matter of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month” (Department of Agriculture). Writing The Jungle was not just a way for Sinclair to gain popularity, he genuinely cared for his fellow Americans, and wrote to the president to fight and win justice for

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