Upton Sinclair was a prolific American author who wrote almost 100 novels and non-fiction books and numerous other materials in his long life. He was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore and died November 28, 1968, in New Jersey. In between those events and in addition to his writing, Sinclair married three women and ran several times for political office in California between 1920 and 1934 on the Socialist and Democratic party tickets. Several of his works, such as The Jungle and The Brass Check, initiated significant reforms in the meat-packing industry and journalistic practice. His 1927 novel Oil! inspired the 2007 film There Will Be Blood. In 1943 he won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
In the winter of 1911 Sinclair and his first wife Meta Fuller settled in Fairhope for a brief stay. He discussed these months on pages 162-165 of his Autobiography which are included below. Throughout his life Sinclair was attracted to progressive and reformist ideas, and that characteristic no doubt drew him to Fairhope. The town had been founded in 1894 as a single-tax colony after the proposals of American journalist and political economist Henry George. In his 1879 book Progress and Poverty George had argued for a single tax on land ownership as a route to a more equitable society. Supporters of this idea settled in Fairhope.
Sinclair had founded a "utopian" colony in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1906, which burned in six months, perhaps by arsonists. Thus as he says at the beginning of the excerpt below, "Since I could not have a colony of my own, I would try other people’s."
The author notes several progressive elements in Fairhope. One is the "cult of Dr. J.H. Salisbury, meat-diet advocate". James Henry Salisbury [1823-1905] was an American physician who was an early advocate of many health ideas related to diet. He developed the lean-beef Salisbury steak in 1888. Some of his ideas arose from his Civil War experience; others from extensive dietary experiments upon himself and others. Sinclair, as he notes a practicing and vocal vegetarian, decided to try the Salisbury meat recipe, and Eugene Wood, a "socialist comrade" also spending the winter in Fairhope, "wrote a jolly piece about 'America’s leading raw-food advocate who happens just now to be living upon a diet of stewed beefsteaks.' I had to bow my head, and add crow to my menu!"
Also mentioned is the Organic School founded in Fairhope in 1907 by Marietta Johnson. She and her family had moved there from Minnesota in 1902. Her school, which continues to operate today, had no tests, homework only for high school students and added craft and folk activities to regular academic studies. The school and Johnson became famous around the country when philosopher and education reformer John Dewey discussed them in his 1915 book Schools of To-Morrow. Upton and Meta's eight year-old son David attended the school during their residence.
At the end of his comments Sinclair notes that in the spring he headed back to another single-tax colony in Arden, Delaware. Smaller than Fairhope, that village has retained its artistic and intellectual focus. The Sinclair's had built a house there in 1910, and Sinclair had been arrested and spent time in jail for playing tennis on a Sunday. After their return Sinclair invited poet Harry Kemp to come camp on their land. Meta and Kemp soon became an item, and Sinclair divorced his wife.
Sinclair worked on a play and a novel while in Fairhope. His comments below include extensive material on the three-act comedy play, "The Naturewoman", which he says he wrote in two and a half days while fasting. He does not recommend the method to his fellow writers. The play, which he said like his others had no success was included in a 1912 collection, Plays of Protest.
He began the novel Love's Pilgrimage in Fairhope in an attempt to describe a situation in which a once-married but now divorced couple could remain friends. He notes that Meta--Corydon in the novel--has come to Fairhope part of the time but returned north before he did. The book was published later in 1911.
Sinclair is a fascinating individual in the history of American fiction, muckraking and political activity. You can find numerous works by Sinclair available at Project Gutenberg.
You can read Mary Lois Timbes' 2006 piece on Sinclair in Fairhope here. Her 2008 history of the town, The Fair Hope of Heaven, includes a chapter on Sinclair.
X
For the winter I took my family to the single-tax colony at Fairhope, Alabama, on Mobile Bay. Since I could not have a colony of my own, I would try other people’s. Here were two or three hundred assorted reformers who had organized their affairs according to the gospel of Henry George. They were trying to eke out a living from poor soil and felt certain they were setting an example to the rest of the world. The climate permitted the outdoor life, and we found a cottage for rent on the bay front, remote from the village. Dave Howatt was with us again; having meantime found himself a raw-food wife, he lived apart from us and came to his secretarial job daily.
I was overworking again; and when my recalcitrant stomach made too much trouble, I would fast for a day, three days, a week. I was trying the raw-food diet, and failing as before. I was now a full-fledged physical culturist, following a Spartan regime. In front of our house ran a long pier, out to the deep water of the bay. Often the boards of this pier were covered with frost, very stimulating to the bare feet, and whipped by icy winds, stimulating to the skin; each morning I made a swim in this bay a part of my law. (Says Zarathustra: “Canst thou hang thy will above thee as thy law?”)
Among the assorted philosophies expressed at Fairhope was the cult of Dr. J. H. Salisbury, meat-diet advocate; I read his book. Let me remind you again that this was before the days of any real knowledge about diet. Salisbury was one of the first regular M.D.’s who tried experiments upon himself and other human beings in order to find out how particular foods actually affect
the human body. He assembled a “poison squad” of healthy young men, fed them on various diets, and studied the ailments they developed. By such methods he thought to prove that excess of carbohydrates was the cause of tuberculosis in humans. His guess was wrong—yet not so far wrong as it seems. It is my belief that denatured forms of starch and sugar are the predisposing cause of the disease; people live on white flour, sugar, and lard, and when the body has become weakened, the inroads of bacteria begin.
Anyhow, Salisbury would put his “poison squad” on a diet of lean beef, chopped and lightly cooked, and cure them of their symptoms in a week or two. He had a phrase by which he described the great health error, “making a yeastpot of your stomach.” That was what I had been doing, and now, to the horror of my friend Dave Howatt, I decided to try the Salisbury system. I remember my emotions, walking up and down in front of the local butchershop and getting up the courage to enter. To my relief, I caused no sensation. Apparently the butcher took it quite as a matter of course that a man should purchase a pound of sirloin.
I had been a practicing vegetarian—and what was worse, a preaching one—for a matter of three years; and now I was a backslider. My socialist comrade, Eugene Wood, happened to be spending the winter in Fairhope, and he wrote a jolly piece about “America’s leading raw-food advocate who happens just now to be living upon a diet of stewed beefsteaks.” I had to bow my head, and add crow to my menu!
XI
In Fairhope was the Organic School, invention of Mrs. Marietta Johnson. It was then a rudimentary affair, conducted in a couple of shacks, but has since become famous. Our son, David, then eight years old, attended it. His education had been scattery, with his parents moving from a winter resort to a summer resort. But he had always had the world’s best literature and had done the rest for himself. Fairhope he found to his taste; we had a back porch and a front porch to our isolated cottage, and he would spread his quilt and pillow on the former, and I would spread
mine on the latter, and sleep outdoors every night on the floor. I asked if he minded the hard surface, and his reply belongs to the days of the world’s divine simplicity. “Oh, Papa, it’s fine! I like to wake up in the night and look at the moon, and listen to the owl, and pee!”
I tried the experiment of fasting while doing my writing; a marvelous idea, to have no stomach at all to interfere with creative activity! A comedy sprang full-grown into my brain, and I wrote it in two days and a half of continuous work—a three-act play, The Naturewoman. I record the feat as a warning to my fellow writers—don’t try it! During a fast you are living on your nerves and cannot stand the strain of creative labor. When I finished, I could hardly digest a spoonful of orange juice.
The Naturewoman, like all my plays, had no success. It was published in the volume Plays of Protest a couple of years later, and had no sale. Not long thereafter, the students of Smith College, studying drama under Samuel Eliot, gave it in New York, and these emancipated young ladies found it charmingly quaint and old-fashioned; they played it in a vein of gentle farce. Apparently it never occurred to them that the author might have meant it that way. I have frequently observed that an advocate of new ideas is not permitted to have a sense of humor; that is apparently reserved for persons who have no ideas at all. For fifty-six years I have been ridiculed for a passage in The Jungle that deals with the moral claims of dying hogs—which passage was intended as hilarious farce. The New York Evening Post described it as “nauseous hogwash”—and refused to publish my letter of explanation.
Corydon had come to Fairhope for a while, and then had gone north on affairs of her own; it had been arranged that she was to get a divorce from me. I thought that a novel about modern marriage that would show the possibility of a couple’s agreeing to part, and still remaining friends, would be interesting and useful. So I began Love’s Pilgrimage. In the spring I came north and took up my residence in another single-tax colony, at Arden, Delaware, founded and run by Frank Stephens, a sculptor of Philadelphia; a charming place about twenty miles from the big city, with many little cabins and bungalows scattered on the edge of the woods. Frank was glad to have me come—and alas,
a year and a half later he was gladder to have me go! For the Philadelphia newspapers found me out, and thereafter, in the stories that appeared about Arden, socialism was more prominent than single tax, and I was more prominent than the founder. This was my misfortune, not my fault. I wanted nothing but to be let alone to write my book; but fate and the editors ruled otherwise.
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