RADICAL INNOCENT(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Few American writers have revealed their private as well as
their public selves so fully as Upton Sinclair, and virtually none
over such a long lifetime (1878—1968). Sinclair’s writing, even at
its most poignant or electrifying, blurred the line between
politics and art–and, indeed, his life followed a similar arc. In
Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur weaves the strands
of Sinclair’s contentious public career and his often-troubled
private life into a compelling personal narrative.
　　An unassuming teetotaler with a fiery streak, called a
propagandist by some, the most conservative of revolutionaries by
others, Sinclair was such a driving force of history that one could
easily mistake his life story for historical fiction. He counted
dozens of epochal figures as friends or confidants, including Mark
Twain, Jack London, Henry Ford, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Theodore
and Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Albert
Camus, and Carl Jung.
　　Starting with The Jungle in 1906, Sinclair’s fiction and
nonfiction helped to inform and mold American opinions about
socialism, labor and industry, religion and philosophy, the
excesses of the media, American political isolation and pacifism,
civil liberties, and mental and physical health.
　　In his later years, Sinclair twice reinvented himself, first as
the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934, and
later, in his sixties and seventies, as a historical novelist. In
1943 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth, one of eleven
novels featuring super-spy Lanny Budd.
　　Outside the literary realm, the ever-restless Sinclair was
seemingly everywhere: forming Utopian artists’ colonies, funding
and producing Sergei Eisenstein’s film documentaries, and waging
consciousness-raising political campaigns. Even when he wasn’t
involved in progressive causes or counterculture movements, his
name often was invoked by them–an arrangement that frequently
embroiled Sinclair in controversy.