Upton Sinclair was an only child born on September 20, 1878. He was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Even though his name was respected in the South from his great-grandfathers fame in the War of 1812, Upton Sinclair grew up in a family without much money. Any profit his father made was spent on alcohol. Living in poverty, the family moved often, unable to pay rent.
Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland in a small row house on September 20, 1878. In addition to this, from an early age he was exposed to differences that would have a long lasting effect on his juvenile mind and drastically influence his thinking as time progressed. Moreover, he was the only child to an alcoholic liquor salesman of a father, and a determined mother, he was raised on the premise of poverty, yet was also exposed to the advantages of the upper class through frequent gatherings with his mother’s wealthy family (biography.com). Equally important, is at the age of ten Sinclair’s father uprooted the family from Baltimore to New York City. During this time, Sinclair started to establish a sharp mind and was an insatiable
Though best known for his muckraking efforts that helped to end the Gilded Age, Upton Sinclair wrote nearly a hundred books in his lifetime. From a young age his mother encouraged in him a love of reading; when he could, Sinclair could be found reading for up to fourteen hours a day. However, his childhood was marked by poverty and his father's raging alcoholism. His mother took a strong sense of morality against his father’s drinking and of all types of sinning. These strict morals implanted in him made the socialist party very appealing.
• Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” which exposed the conditions of the meat packing industry in Chicago. • Moved to Pasadena, California in 1915 and wrote 47 books by 1933. • Sinclair ran for governor of California in the election of 1926 and in 1930 but in 1933 ran as democrat for governor of California • “I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future” (1933) a utopia novel written by Sinclair, if elected, he would end unemployment. • Sinclair proposed another program called End Poverty in California (EPIC) • If any farms were sold for taxes would be purchased by California and establish cooperative agricultures communicates known as “California Authority for Land.” This would only be put into effect
Novelist, Eric Schlosser, in his novel, “Fast Food Nation”, expresses how fast food has spread. Schlosser’s purpose is to make us see how addicted we are to fast food. He adopts a shocking tone through the use of diction, Logos, and diction in order to get people to make better choices. For starters, one of the strategies that Schlosser used in this text is diction. Diction can be defined as style of speaking or writing determined by the choice of words by a speaker /writer.
The word dangerous is used to describe something that can cause harm to an individual: a dangerous job is just that. For the first time in the book, Schlosser focuses on what he considers the most dangerous job in the fast food industry: sanitation workers. He does this throughout chapter eight in the section “the worst”. Schlosser incorporates vivid descriptions of slaughter house conditions as well as accounts involving those affected by the lack of safety precautions to implicitly compare the similarities between sanitation workers of the slaughter house and the cattle that are also being murdered there. Schlosser’s main purpose for this section, and the chapter as a whole, is to emphasize the hazardous conditions that workers must endure
Eudora Welty (b.1909) In her essay titled Place in Fiction, Eudora Welty spoke of her work as filled with the spirit of place: “Location is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course.” Both her outwardly uneventful life and her writing are most intimately connected to the topography and atmosphere, the season and the soil of the native Mississippi that has been her lifelong home. Born in Jackson in 1909, to parents who came from the North, and raised in comfortable circumstances, she attended Mississippi State College for Women, then graduated from the University of Wisconsin in1929.
The Jungle is a widely known book created by Upton Sinclair. Its mainly about a man by the name of Jurgis Rudkus and his family immigrating from Lithuania to Chicago for a better life in the Americas. The family finds a employment in a meat-packing factory. The family quickly realizes their dream becomes into a nightmare and it is not what they hoped for.
Throughout the history of American literature, many writers have shed light upon the strong work ethic and determination embodied by Americans. However, the shortcomings of different groups of Americans in trying to achieve success despite expressing these characteristics has been made evident by authors explaining how problems from sexism to working conditions have impeded people from being able to succeed. Authors including President Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson have praised the traits of hard work and dedication in trying to achieve success as they feel by way of having these traits, it is possible for someone to succeed at what he or she wants to endeavor in. In contrast, writers ranging from Carl Sandburg and Upton Sinclair,
Greg Smith is a novelist who lives in New York City. An undergraduate of Bowdoin College, Smith wrote four popular novels throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s, including The Divine Comedy of John Venner and The Devil in the Dooryard. Afterwards, Smith stopped writing novels so he would not be as far from his friends and family and wrote short stories instead. A majority of his short stories came together in issues known as The Midwest Quarterly, a collection of short stories and poems dealing with specific controversies. One of his issues of The Midwest Quarterly talks about literary criticism of fictional stories by popular authors.
What does it mean to be a social hero? “To be a hero is means you step across the line and are willing to make a sacrifice, so heroes always are making a sacrifice. Heroes always take a risk. Heroes always are deviant. Heroes always doing something that most people don't and we want to change” (Philip Zimbardo).
Every major fast-food company has secrets. The secrets are out thanks to Eric Schlosser's book Chew on This. Chew on This is a non-fiction book written by Eric Schlosser to inform the readers about what really happens in a major fast-food franchise. The book Chew on This uses word choice, statistics, and one-sided arguments to show author's bias.