Upton Sinclair - Marriage and Family

Marriage and Family

Sinclair married Meta Fuller, who had been a friend of his in childhood and whose family was one of the First Families of Virginia, in 1902. Sinclair had a son with Fuller. They named the child David. He was born on December 1, 1901. Around 1911, Meta left Sinclair for the poet Harry Kemp, later known as the Dunes Poet of Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In 1913 Sinclair married Mary Craig Kimbrough (1883–1961), a woman from an elite Greenwood, Mississippi, family who had written articles and a book on Winnie Davis, the daughter of Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis. He met her when she attended a lecture by him about The Jungle. In the 1920s, they moved to California. They were married until her death in 1961.

After Craig's death in 1961, Sinclair married Mary Elizabeth Willis (1882–1967).

Sinclair was opposed to sex outside of marriage. He viewed even sex within marriage as only being justified by procreation. He told Meta that only the birth of a child gave marriage "dignity and meaning". However, he did have an affair with Anna Noyes while married to Meta. He wrote an unpublished novel about the affair called Love's Progress, a sequel to Love's Pilgrimage. After that, his wife had an affair with John Armistead Collier, a theology student from Memphis.