Anthony Arthur
23049 Erwin St. Woodland Hills, CA 91367
818-703-1286 E-mail: rarthur1@socal.rr.com
Upton Sinclair: Radical Innocent, by Anthony Arthur, will be published by Random House in 2006, under the editorship of Bob Loomis. The following is a brief description by the author of his forthcoming biography and a request for assistance from interested parties.
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The title of my biography conveys its direction: Upton Sinclair was ‘radical’ in the familiar sense of coming at American (and world) problems from the Left, proposing socialist solutions from his early book, The Jungle, until he died at the age of ninety, in 1968. He was ‘innocent’ in the sense that he never lost the occasionally naïve idealism that allowed him to maintain hope during a century of war unprecedented in human history. My biography will address his political and social beliefs and actions fully, of course, but its essential focus will be on the relationship between his personal life and his writing, which I argue deserves more attention for its literary art, not merely propaganda, than it has received. Unlike most American writers, Sinclair got better as he grew older, hitting his full stride after he was sixty with his monumental sequence of novels about the first half of the twentieth century—the ‘Lanny Budd’ series.
I have completed my reading of Sinclair’s vast body of work and worked with his papers at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. Leon Harris’s first full study of Sinclair is useful among other things for the reminiscences of those who who remembered Sinclair personally. I hope to hear from those who may have documents or letters relating to Sinclair and his many friends and correspondents that have not made it to the Lilly collection. Additionally, I want to establish contact with the many scholars who are currently interested in Sinclair. I have indicated my email and street addresses above, as well as my telephone. Please feel free to contact me at any time, and to forward this announcement to others who might find it of interest.
Brief biography: Anthony Arthur has published four previous books, all with Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press: Deliverance at Los Baños (1985); Bushmasters (1987); The Tailor-King (2000); and Literary Feuds (2002). (Amazon.com provides an excellent site for Literary Feuds, including reviews.) He is an emeritus professor of English, California State University, Northridge.