The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962)

AUTHOR: Sinclair, Upton

KEYWORDS: diet, health, labor rights, social reform, Temperance

Alcott, William
Allen, James Madison
Bellamy, Edward
Clubb, Stephen Henry
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Graham, Sylvester
Howells, William Dean
Jackson, James Caleb
Kellogg, John Harvey
Nichols, Mary Sargeant Gove
Nichols, Thomas Low
Rumford, Isaac B.
Trall, Russell Thacher
White, Ellen Gould Harmon

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

While in his autobiography Sinclair focuses on his literary life and social justice activism, he also gives an account of his experiences with health reform and veganism. He describes his literary career in tandem with his socialist activism because the two are inseparable: “To me,” he writes, “literature was a weapon in the class struggle – of the master class to hold its servants down, and of the working class to break its bonds. In other words, I studied world literature from the socialist point of view” (235). It is in this vein that he later writes: “I have seen changes in America, and I tell myself I have helped a little to bring them about” (227).

While labor rights and the plight of the working class were at the heart of both Sinclair's activism and his literary work, he also fought on behalf of a series of related social justice issues, including women's rights, education, health reform, and birth control. He was also a life-long teetotaler and supporter of prohibition, as he explains, “ever since I had seen my father and two of my uncles die as alcoholics” (248). He gives an account of his father's alcoholism early in the book and credits his mother for his prohibitionist convictions: 

Whisky in its multiple forms – mint juleps, toddies, hot Scotches, egg-nogs, punch – was the most conspicuous single fact in my boyhood. I saw it and smelled it and heard it everywhere I turned, but I never tasted it.

     The reason was my mother, whose whole married life was poisoned by alcohol, and who taught me a daily lesson in horror. It took my good and gentle-souled father thirty or forty years to kill himself, and I watched the process week by week and sometimes hour by hour. It made an indelible impression upon my childish soul, and is the reason why I am a prohibitionist, to the dismay of my “libertarian” friends (6-7).

Despite his prolific literary exploits and his lifelong socialist activism, Sinclair claims that he knows the problem of alcoholism “with greater intimacy than any other theme I have ever handled. The list of drunkards I have wrestled with is longer than the list of coal miners, oil magnates, politicians, or any other group I have known and portrayed in my books” (44).

In his autobiography Sinclair glosses as wage slavery, in a thoroughly corrupt system (110), the abysmal working conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry that he exposes in his best-known novell, The Jungle. He offers, for instance, a short anecdote about “a wild, one-eyed Irishman who had been a foreman on Armour’s killing beds and had told under oath the story of how the condemned carcasses, thrown into the tanks to be destroyed, were taken out at the bottom of the tanks and sold in the city for meat” (117). Being subject to stomach pains and digestion issues throughout much of his life (due, he believed, to stress and overwork), Sinclair was an avid follower of health reform:

There is a saying among women that every child costs a tooth. With me it read: every crusade costs a tooth. Of course this wasn’t necessary; it was not merely overwork but ignorance of diet, the eating of white flour and sugar and other denatured foods, and pouring into the drain pipe the mineral salts from fruits and vegetables. But I did not know anything about all this; my college education, which had left out socialism, and money, and love and marriage, had also left out diet and health (125).

At one point, Sinclair's first wife, Meta Fuller Sinclair, is taken to the Battle Creek Sanitarium to recuperate from “an attack of appendicitis” (138). It is around this time, in the latter years of the first decade of the twentieth century, that Sinclair starts “to grope around in the field of diet reform” (138), eventually trying out vegetarianism. Visiting his wife at the Sanitarium, he “listened to Dr. W. K. Kellogg set forth the horrors of a carnivorous diet, and as a result … tried vegetarianism for the next three years” (140-141).

Sinclair reports that he eventually settled on the raw food diet to mitigate his own health problems:

I had been reading the literature of the health cranks, and had resolved upon a drastic experiment; I would try the raw-food diet, for which so much was promised. I ate two meals a day, of nuts, fruits, olives, and salad vegetables; the only cooked food being two or three shredded-wheat biscuits or some graham crackers. The diet agreed with me marvelously, and for the entire period I never had an ache or pain. So I was triumphant, entirely overlooking the fact that I was doing none of the nerve-destroying labor of creative writing. I was reading, walking, riding horseback, playing tennis, meeting with George and other friends; if I had done that all my life I might never have had an ache or pain (151).

Eventually, his family, too, “was giving [the raw food diet] a trial” (156). Sinclair mentions that both his anti-sex stance and his raw food experiment generated interest as “newspaper reporters came and wrote up my 'squirrel diet' and my views on love and marriage” (153). Sinclair succinctly summarizes his politico-ethical convictions when he describes his then “household assistant and secretary,” a fellow enthusiast of raw foods and “Bernarr Macfadden's Physical Culture City” as “[a] youth after my own heart – vegetarian, teetotaler, nonsmoker, pacifist, philosophical anarchist, conscientious objector to capitalism, dreamer, and practitioner of brotherhood” (157). Sinclair describes his eventual difficulties with the raw food diet: “[T]he diet,” he writes,

that had served me so marvelously on the shore of the Pacific played the dickens with me on the shore of the Atlantic. The difference was that now I was doing creative writing, putting a continuous strain upon brain and nerves, and apparently not having the energy to digest raw food. Dave Howatt, in his role of guide and mentor, thought my indigestion was due to my evil habit of including cooked breadstuff in the diet, so for a while I changed from a squirrel to a monkey. Then he thought I ate too much, so I cut the quantity in half, which reduced the size of the balloon inside me; but it left me hungry all the time, so that when I played tennis, I would have to stop in the middle and come home and get a prune (157).

He subsequently contacts Bernarr Macfadden and moves with his family to his institution, which, given that it was located in Battle Creek, he glosses as “a rival institution to the Battle Creek Sanitarium” (158). Sinclair claims that Macfadden taught him “free, gratis, and for nothing, more about the true principles of keeping well and fit for my work than all the orthodox and ordained physicians who charged me many thousands of dollars for not doing it” (158). These principles and methods included extended periods of “fasting” with a subsequent “milk diet,” “Nacktkultur,” and the use of “vitamins” (159). Sinclair gives an account of these experiences in The Fasting Cure. Although Sinclair reverted to carnism for a while, “I had been a practicing vegetarian – and what was worse, a preaching one – for a matter of three years; and now I was a backslider” (163), he later returned to a plant-based diet. Prompted by the health condition of his second wife, Mary Craig Kimbrough, and the “rice-and-fruit-diet” she was prescribed, Sinclair decided to try it himself in hopes of sharing her excellent results:

I added celery to the diet – it is a vegetable of which I happen to be fond, and it gave me what I thought was the necessary bulk for safety. I added a spoonful of dried-milk powder for a little more salt. We were both having large quantities of fruit juice, mine being pineapple because it is the sweetest. Both of us took vitamins.

     Throughout most of my writing life, certainly for a half century of it, I had been accustomed to say that I was never more than twenty-four hours ahead of a headache. But from the time I adopted the diet of rice and fruit, which I still follow, I ceased to have headaches, and I have even forgotten, now, what a headache feels like. Nor have I had any other ailment, not even a cold (312-313).