The Jungle Lesson Plan

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. His alcoholic father sold liquor, and the family did not have much money while Sinclair was growing up. However, his grandparents were wealthy, and because Sinclair spent much of his childhood with them, he had an early vision of the disparities between rich and poor in nineteenth-century America. Sinclair would later remark that these disparities planted the early seeds of his views on social activism. Sinclair attended the City College of New York at the age of fourteen and first began publishing stories and articles to earn a living. He married Meta Fuller in 1900. Their relationship was often tumultuous, and she left Sinclair...