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 looked at my daughters, and my boyhood picture, and appreciated the gift of parenthood, at that moment, more than any other gift I have ever been given. For what person, except one’s own children, would want so deeply and sincerely to have shared your childhood? Who else would think your insignificant and petty life so precious in the living, so rich in its expressiveness, that it would be worth partaking of what you were, to understand what you are?”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever- present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)
“The want of education and moral training is the only real barrier that exists between the different classes of men. Nature, reason, and Christianity recognize no other. Pride may say Nay; but Pride was always a liar, and a great hater of the truth.”
—Susanna Moodie (1803–1885)