Upton Sinclair: Hell

Upton Sinclair was a novelist, journalist, reformer, and occasional poet whose long California residence made him a central figure in the state's political literature. Best known for The Jungle, he used documentary fiction to expose industrial labor and corporate power. After moving to Pasadena, he turned Southern California into both a base of operations and a subject, culminating politically in his 1934 End Poverty in California campaign for governor. The four works preserved for this anthology illuminate less familiar edges of his career. Hell is a verse drama; The Millennium is a speculative fantasia; Mental Radio records experiments in telepathy conducted with his wife Mary Craig Sinclair and carries a preface by Albert Einstein; Poverty in California belongs directly to the EPIC campaign. Together they show Sinclair moving between poetic form, utopian speculation, occult inquiry, and political pamphlet. His inclusion rests not on treating him primarily as a lyric poet, but on recognizing how verse and experimental genres entered the broader radical writing culture of Los Angeles.