Upton Sinclair
3 books by Upton Sinclair to read free, each with its best passages and lines, and the best quotes from all of them below.
Where to start
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The Jungle
A working-class Lithuanian immigrant family’s struggle to make a living in the turn-of-the-century Chicago stockyards.
149,219 words, about 10 hours
Then
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King Coal
A wealthy student takes a job as a miner in order to learn about dangerous and exploitative working conditions in the coal mining industry.
122,967 words, about 9 hours
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Oil!
A wealthy oil tycoon’s son grapples with his father’s unethical business practices as he forms alliances with oilfield workers and socialists in Southern California.
218,466 words, about 15 hours
Upton Sinclair quotes
A charming informality was one of the characteristics of this celebration.
“You’ll find it easier walkin’ back.”
Dad’s way constituted the ethics of motoring.
The thing to do is to crack every fighting head that you see, before there are so many fighting heads that you cannot crack any of them.
The mule is notoriously a profane and godless creature; a blind alley of Nature, so to speak, a mistake of which she is ashamed, and which she does not permit to reproduce itself.
“In God we Trust, All Others Cash.”
It might have come from the centre of the world, this smoke, where the fires of the ages still smoulder.
“Ye can never be sure, lad. Perhaps tonight a storm may come and blow it to pieces. Perhaps if ye’d pulled it and been happy, ’twould ’a’ been what the rose was for.”
“Look out for people who mistake you for an oil well, and try to put you on the pump!”
The packers might own the land, but he claimed the landscape, and there was no one to say nay to this.
“ ’Tis no joke, the life of workin’ men, wherever ye try it,” added the other; and when young Tim started to express an opinion, they shut him up with such evident anxiety that Hal’s heart ached for them, and he made haste to change the subject.
It isn’t easy to live altogether in the spirit while you are not fully grown!
Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where they were requited for all this suffering?
“Maybe!” was the answer. “Maybe they make him fire himself.”
Dad answered that only the Holy Spirit could tell that.
Grandmother Majauszkiene had lived in the midst of misfortune so long that it had come to be her element, and she talked about starvation, sickness, and death as other people might about weddings and holidays.
“A woman! Is it only the women that can have courage?”
The father kept two compartments in his mind, one for things that were right, and the other for things that existed, and which you had to allow to exist, and to defend, in a queer, halfhearted, but stubborn way.
It was a war of each against all, and the devil take the hindmost.
“Yes, that seems to be their attitude. That’s the rule they apply to all the world—if anything goes wrong with you, it must be your own fault. It’s a land of equal opportunity.”