Sinclair's Letters

...Inevitably, what has been sacrificed to the established value of certain names is the personal note—the warm, reciprocal flow of confidences...

...but the majority, as Sinclair points out in his introduction, span the two decades following publication of The Jungle...

...they serve as pretexts for the annotations which introduce the writers and provide a gloss on the drama of Sinclair's career...

...Dos Passos, Caldwell, Farrell and the early Steinbeck) ; it is the nature of his interests and the vantage point from which he treats them...

...Romain Holland is characterized as "a saintly Frenchman, though I know that sounds odd...

...It is not entirely the quality of Sinclair's prose, or even the bulk of it, that has forestalled discussion of his work (and, to a lesser degree, that of Dreiser...

...It is brutal with life"), is dated 1905...

...Sinclair, was written in 1957...

...If one of the aims of the collection, as seems obvious, was to demonstrate the widespread and persistent interest in Sinclair's career, what is significantly lacking is the voice of the people...

...A one-line epitaph concludes Sinclair's account of his transactions with an early correspondent: "The unhappy man later died an alcoholic...

...In an era when we find ourselves so much at the mercy of Madison Avenue and the State Department, we are apt to be suspicious of appeals, bored with good intentions and frightened by the prospect of new worlds that, with or without our sanction, insist on being born...

...And so it is Upton Sinclair himself who has to remind us, among other things, that a committee of distinguished scholars, including John Dewey...

...Why, one finally asks, should this humane and dedicated and courageous man, whose career speaks so much better for itself than this collection of letters is able to do, feel that he has to initiate the building of his own monument...

...The earliest letter, from Jack London praising The Jungle ("It is alive and warm...

...the latest, from Van Wyck Brooks to Mrs...

...From an estimated quarter of a million letters addressed to her husband, Mrs...

...Less annoying and more entertaining are the occasions when the editor's well-known puritanism asserts itself and we are reminded that his mother originally intended him to be an Episcopal bishop...

...Wells (whose career Sinclair's most resembles) , Gandhi, Einstein, Santayana, Thomas Mann and Bertrand Russell, but it ranges far down the scale of greatness to admit those friends, such as George Sterling and Harry Kemp, for whom the editor evidently felt particular affection or loyalty and who consequently are represented by generous if not always flattering selections...

...Is it because the image that we have of ourselves determines at any given time what writers we will admire...

...his annotations to the letters collected in the present volume may not be very helpful, but they are nevertheless unflaggingly genial...

...from these Sinclair has selected some 300 for this volume...

...Why no gleaning from the thousands of letters from obscure but passionate readers—those "humble people of our land" for whom, as Sinclair announced in the preface to his first novel, he hoped to produce a library of helpful books...

...There are some writers who, under such conditions, disturb us by their faith and whom we punish by neglecting...

...Letter-writing for Sinclair seems to have been in large measure a substitute for the distracting give-and-take of social intercourse...

...much of the time he has been...

...From the outset of his career, 65 years ago, he has assisted the process, as Whitman did before him, by developing the arts of self-publicity—sending out his books by scores to the leading figures of his time, carrying on a massive correspondence with those same figures, scanning the reviews with the jealous anxiety of a fledgling writer and, on the slightest pretext, flooding the letter columns with protests...

...From one point of view the result may be fortunate, since much of what might otherwise have evaporated in conversation was distilled into letters that were preserved in those crowded files...

...I suspect, incidentally, that many of the most complimentary letters were ticketed on receipt and placed in a separate file for future use as testimonials, for with one exception all of the letters that Floyd Dell quoted from in his 1927 biography of Sinclair are also in this collection...

...Reviewed by Blake Nevius Associate Professor of English, University of California at Los Angeles UPTON SINCLAIR HAS never been one to wait for history to make up its mind about him...

...Harold Laski, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell, and ably seconded by George Bernard Shaw, once proposed him for the Nobel Prize for Literature...

...It is both pleasant and rather sad to report that in his 80s he has mellowed...

...Some of the letters have no intrinsic interest whatsoever...

...But the formal barrier that seems to exist between Sinclair and some of his correspondents has its disadvantage: Too many of the letters exhibit the slight paralysis of tone that might similarly have afflicted the writer if he found himself addressing a public statue...

...The future biographer who turns to these annotations will be disappointed, for they are cursory and frequently ingenuous...

...Though he began his career as a writer of jokes for the comic weeklies, Sinclair has not been conspicuous for his humor...

...Sinclair is supposed to have winnowed, over a period of years, 7,000 as having special interest...

...And Jack London's suicide is explained with equal laconicism: "It was John Barleycorn's doing...

...The roster of correspondents includes many of the giants of 20th-century thought, notably Shaw...

...And since the severest test of a man's sense of humor is the criticism aimed at his own defects, it should be added that the golden opinions generally voiced in these letters are relieved by occasional jibes, mainly from George Sterling, Floyd Dell and, as might be expected, from H. L. Mencken...

...Published almost coincidentally with the purchase by Indiana University of Sinclair's literary estate, My Lifetime in Letters is a thin sampling of the rich ore contained in those eight tons of documents shipped from California to Bloomington—a kind of prospectus for interested scholars...

...Usually he has felt himself to be misunderstood...