Early Life and Education
Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Upton Beall Sinclair and Priscilla Harden. His father was a liquor salesman whose alcoholism shadowed his son's childhood. Priscilla Harden Sinclair was a strict Episcopalian who disliked alcohol, tea, and coffee. Sinclair did not get along with her when he became older because of her strict rules and refusal to allow him independence. Sinclair told his son David that around his sixteenth year he decided not to have anything to do with her and stayed away from her for 35 years because a controversy would start if they met. Her lineage was of great affluence. Her parents were very prosperous in Baltimore and her sister married a millionaire. Sinclair had wealthy grandparents with whom he often stayed. This gave him insight into how both the rich and the poor lived during the late nineteenth century. Living in two social settings affected him and greatly influenced his books. Upton Beall Sinclair Sr. was also from a highly respected family in the south, but due to the Civil War and Reconstruction, the family's wealth evaporated and the family became ruined.
Growing up, Upton Sinclair's family would move around continuously due to the fact that Sinclair Sr. wasn't successful. Sinclair Jr. developed a love for reading at an early age of five years old. He read every book that his mother owned for a deeper understanding of the world. In 1888, the Sinclair family moved to Queens, New York, where his father sold shoes and where Sinclair entered the City College of New York, five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote jokes, dime novels and magazine articles in boy's weekly and pulp magazines to pay for his tuition.
He graduated in 1897 and then studied for a time at Columbia University. He was there majoring in law, but he was more interested in writing, and he learned several languages including Spanish, German and French. On a good day, he would write at least one thousand words. He wrote a book, entitled Manassas. It was about the Civil War. He did this while still attending Columbia University.
Read more about this topic: Upton Sinclair
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“No two men see the world exactly alike, and different temperaments will apply in different ways a principle that they both acknowledge. The same man will, indeed, often see and judge the same things differently on different occasions: early convictions must give way to more mature ones. Nevertheless, may not the opinions that a man holds and expresses withstand all trials, if he only remains true to himself and others?”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing—it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)
“Because of these convictions, I made a personal decision in the 1964 Presidential campaign to make education a fundamental issue and to put it high on the nation’s agenda. I proposed to act on my belief that regardless of a family’s financial condition, education should be available to every child in the United States—as much education as he could absorb.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)