Sinclair was now, at the young age of 28, a famous writer sitting on a small fortune with which he could do anything. He decided after careful planning to build a communal living experiment under Socialist principles in New Jersey. He called it the Helicon Home Colony. It was mildly successful in establishing a Socialist base until, six months after being built, a fire burned the community to the ground. Sinclair chose instead of dwelling on this failure to learn from the prosperous time he had lived there. After all, the commune was successful in the ultimate socialist goal of production for use instead pf production for profit (Bloodworth).
After his success with The Jungle and the abrupt end to his socialist commune, Upton Sinclair decided he wanted a more important role in politics than just the writer of socialist propaganda. Under the socialist party, Sinclair first ran for Congressmen for New Jersey, but lost horribly to his opponent. Sinclair continued to run for other public offices, but to no avail. This is probably due to the fact that people of the time heard he was a socialist and therefore labeled him as a radical before listening to his stances.
Many famous people of this era can be described as “one-hit wonders”, that is, they did one huge thing to better the country and then spent the rest of their life continuing that good deed or desperately trying to do something even better. Upton Sinclair did not stop succeeding after The Jungle, even though most of his endeavors for political office were not successful. Upton Sinclair had, as mentioned earlier, experienced both upper and lower class living. Wanting to bridge the gap between the two, Sinclair moved on to helping the people in California. He called this movement Ending Poverty in California, a straight-forward name that was shortened to EPIC. Sinclair planned to take over farms and factories that were not in use and run them as cooperatives. Californian Republicans were appalled by this idea and, in a mass effort, rallied against Upton Sinclair's movement. Although most of the Californian Democrats thought Sinclair's ideas were radical at best, they rallied around him because they liked his intentions and they thought he could be used in stealing supporters from Republicans. Sinclair ran for governor in order to implement his plans, but lost to his opponent Frank Merriam. This election was one of the first where candidates utilized campaign strategies, advertisements throughout the media, and attacked their opponents. Although Sinclair lost, his EPIC movement lived on through the Democratic Party of California (San Francisco Museum).
One of the last successful novels written by Upton Sinclair was Dragon's Teeth in 1942. This story told of the Nazi's rise to power in Germany, and also provided some philosophy of the nature of human civilization. Sinclair wrote near the end of the novel:
Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure- such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.
Sinclair is using this language to describe human tendency to take bad things that have happened in the past and using them to bring pleasure to people in the future. Some examples of this would be movies of the holocaust, plays and poems from Nazi Germany, and first-hand accounts of Jews living in Nazi prison camps. It is interesting that Sinclair points out this fact that is almost always forgotten, because his own works such as The Jungle have become known as brilliant literary works, even if they had not originally intended to bring pleasure to the reader. It even goes a step further because in 1943, a year after the book was published, it won the famed Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. This proved Sinclair's philosophy that agonies, struggles, and torments of the past are only subject to be turned into pleasure for a future audience (Sinclair).
Upton Sinclair died in November of 1968, at the age of ninety years old. In his lifetime, he had published more than ninety books, almost all of which dealt with socialism and muckraking. He was an important man in the history of the United States. He set out to gain social reform, and, without intending to, his works prompted the passing of several regulations and laws that made this country a better place. Although many still question Sinclair's radical beliefs, he devoted his life to them and was successful at bringing positive change to the world. Unfortunately, as mentioned in one of his final novels, he may only be remembered as a great socialist author who wrote fictional stories. He would, however, want to be remembered as a man who stood up for what he believed for and use his writing talent not to entertain, but to inform.
