A Captain of Industry, Being the Story of a Civilized Man
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A Captain of Industry: Being the Story of a Civilized Man is a tale about a spoiled but good natured son of a corrupt industrialist who manipulates the stock market for his own amusement and gain. He dismisses his ex-fiancé who is dying of consumption and pleads with him to look after the daughter they had together years whom he never knew. He loses his millions through fraudulent market transactions only earn it back, destroying other companies in the process. Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in vairous genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle exposing conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence."
Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state’s ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism, and the eleven novels in Pulitzer Prize–winning Lanny Budd series.
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