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 his first wife 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 He wrote an unpublished novel about the affair called Love's Progress, a sequel to Love's Pilgrimage.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: Springtime And Harvest
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or family:
“Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse longest to help with the dishes. The sink is the great symbol of the bloodiness of family life.”
—Julian Mitchell (20th century)