Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (1878–1968) was an American author, muckraker, and political activist, and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California. Sinclair’s work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, The Jungle exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the US meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. It was his research for The Jungle that led to his devotion to fasting.
