This is a lefty novel .
I read it a decade or so ago and don’t remember it being particularly lefty. I actually thought it was a bit of a confused mess and mediocre.
Upton Sinclair Jr. (1878 – 1968) was an outspoken socialist and muckraker, no doubt about that. But he certainly did some good when there were some really bad things going on in the food industry and journalism.
We read “The Jungle” around 1967 in high school and it was an eye-opener. It was his first book that brought him fame and contributed in part to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.
In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muck-raking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.
He is also well remembered for the line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (so true in 2021)
Of his California gubernatorial bid, Sinclair remarked in 1951: “The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label. I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to ‘End Poverty in California’ I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them.”
I think he was rather prescient with that remark.