born Sept. 20, 1878, Baltimore, Md., U.S.
died Nov. 25, 1968, Bound Brook, N.J.
U.S. novelist.
He was supporting himself as a journalist when an assignment led him to write The Jungle (1906), a best-selling muckraking exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards. A landmark among naturalistic, proletarian novels, it aroused great public indignation and resulted in the passage of the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act. Many other topical novels followed, as well as the successful Lanny Budd series of 11 contemporary historical novels featuring an antifascist hero, beginning with World's End (1940) and including Dragon's Teeth (1942, Pulitzer Prize). In the 1930s Sinclair organized a socialist reform movement and won the Democratic nomination for governor of California.