Early Life and Education
Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism shadowed his son's childhood. Priscilla Harden Sinclair was a strict Episcopalian who disliked alcohol, tea, and coffee. Sinclair did not get along with her when he became older because of her strict rules and refusal to allow him independence. Sinclair told his son David that around his sixteenth year he decided not to have anything to do with her and stayed away from her for 35 years because a controversy would start if they met. Her lineage was of great affluence. Her parents were very prosperous in Baltimore and her sister married a millionaire. Sinclair had wealthy grandparents with whom he often stayed. This gave him insight into how both the rich and the poor lived during the late nineteenth century. Living in two social settings affected him and greatly influenced his books. Upton Beall Sinclair Sr. was also from a highly respected family in the south, but due to the Civil War and Reconstruction, the family's wealth evaporated and the family became ruined.
Growing up, Upton Sinclair's family would move around continuously due to the fact that Sinclair Sr. wasn't successful. Sinclair Jr. developed a love for reading at an early age of five years old. He read every book that his mother owned for a deeper understanding of the world. In 1888, the Sinclair family moved to Queens, New York, where his father sold shoes and where Sinclair entered the City College of New York, five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote jokes, dime novels and magazine articles in boy's weekly and pulp magazines to pay for his tuition.
He graduated in 1897 and then studied for a time at Columbia University. He was there majoring in law, but he was more interested in writing, and he learned several languages including Spanish, German and French. He supported himself through college by writing boys' adventure stories and jokes. Using stenographers, he wrote up to 8,000 words of pulp fiction per day. After leaving Columbia, he wrote 4 commercially unsuccessful, though critically well-received books, King Midas (1901), Prince Hagen (1902), The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903) and a Civil War novel entitled Manassas (1904).
Read more about this topic: Springtime And Harvest
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I could be, I discovered, by turns stern, loving, wise, silly, youthful, aged, racial, universal, indulgent, strict, with a remarkably easy and often cunning detachment ... various ways that an adult, spurred by guilt, by annoyance, by condescension, by loneliness, deals with the prerogatives of power and love.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)