Upton Sinclair was a writer whose main concerns were politics and economics. His ideas about literature--his own, written over more than six decades, and that of others--were inseparable from his dreams of social justice. Consequently, the great majority of his books, fiction as well as nonfiction, were written as specific means to specific ends. Since the essential purpose of literature, for Sinclair, was the betterment of human conditions, he was a muckraker, a propagandist, an interpreter of socialism and a critic of capitalism, a novelist more concerned with content than form, a journalistic chronicler of his times rather than an enduring artist. Since World War II, his literary reputation has declined. Yet The Jungle (1906) is one of the best known and most historically significant of American novels, and Sinclair himself remains an important figure in American political and cultural history.

Although it is possible to do justice to...