Marriage and Family
Sinclair married Meta Fuller, who had been a friend of his in childhood and whose family was one of the First Families of Virginia, in 1902. Sinclair had a son with Fuller. They named the child David. He was born on December 1, 1901. Around 1911, Meta left Sinclair for the poet Harry Kemp, later known as the Dunes Poet of Provincetown, Massachusetts.
In 1913 Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough (1883–1961), a woman from an elite Greenwood, Mississippi, family who had written articles and a book on Winnie Davis, the daughter of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis. He met her when she attended a lecture by him about The Jungle. In the 1920s, they moved to California. They were married until her death in 1961.
After Craig's death in 1961, Sinclair married Mary Elizabeth Willis (1882–1967).
Sinclair was opposed to sex outside of marriage. He viewed even sex within marriage as only being justified by procreation. He told Meta that only the birth of a child gave marriage "dignity and meaning". However, he did have an affair with Anna Noyes while married to Meta. He wrote an unpublished novel about the affair called Love's Progress, a sequel to Love's Pilgrimage. After that, his wife had an affair with John Armistead Collier, a theology student from Memphis.
Read more about this topic: Upton Sinclair
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or family:
“The economic dependence of woman and her apparently indestructible illusion that marriage will release her from loneliness and work and worry are potent factors in immunizing her from common sense in dealing with men at work.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)