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American novelist Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland and came from Southern aristocracy. When Sinclair was ten, the family moved to New York. He started to write dime novels at the age of 15 and produced fiction articles magazines to finance his studies at New York City College. In 1897 he enrolled Columbia University, determined to succeed while producing one poorly paid novel per week. In 1900 Sinclair married his first wife which he later divorced in 1911. The unhappy marriage led to the writing of Springtime and Harvest, "a tale of penniless lovers." By 1904 Sinclair started to move toward writing realistic fiction. He had become a regular reader of the Appeal to Reason, a socialist-populist weekly. With his strong development of socialistic views and interests, Sinclair began his work The Jungle, portraying a factual account of Chicago's meat packing industry in fiction form. From 1915 Sinclair lived in Pasadena, California and later in Buckeye, Arizona. At the age of 24 he joined the Socialist Party. In 1934 he run for the governor of California, but failed on election - as in some other elections before. He spent the decade largely in other activities than writing novels: he experimented with telepathy, followed Sergey Eienstein who tried to make movies in the U.S. and Mexico, and ran for political office. From Pasadena Sinclair suddenly moved in 1953 to a remote Arizona village of Buckeye. His second wife, whom he married in 1913, predeceased him in 1961, as did his third wife, in 1967. Sinclair died on November 25, 1968.
Among Sinclair's most famous books is The Jungle (1906), which launched a public uproar and catapulted the government amidst a frenzy in an investigation of the meatpacking plants of Chicago, and changed the food laws of America. Today his works are not widely read, mostly because writers with political and social ideals are not popular.