Upton Sinclair

Sinclair was born in Baltimore to an impoverished, alcoholic father from a once-prominent Southern family, and put himself through City College of New York writing pulp fiction and dime novels under pseudonyms to pay tuition. Commissioned by a socialist newspaper, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants researching the exploitation of immigrant laborers for what became The Jungle.

He used the book's earnings to found Helicon Home Colony, a short-lived utopian commune in New Jersey that burned down within a year. A committed socialist his whole life, he ran for governor of California in 1934 on his End Poverty in California platform and lost badly after a ferocious opposition campaign from Hollywood and the press.

Astonishingly prolific across nearly a hundred books over six decades, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943 for Dragon's Teeth, part of his Lanny Budd series tracking a fictional insider through the era's political upheavals. He died in New Jersey in 1968.