Samuel the Seeker, Classics To Go
Sinclair’s novel follows the journey of Samuel Prescott, an idealistic young farm boy who strikes out on his own to strike it rich when his father dies shortly after losing all of his savings in a bad stock market investment. What would typically be a rags-to-riches story becomes a rags-to-rags exercise in futility, as Samuel is confronted with every form of social injustice and societal ill that you can imagine. Upton introduces Samuel to the reader as a virtual blank slate with little more than farming and bible verses to inform his world view. Through the novel, Samuel eagerly adopts every world philosophy introduced to him, only to watch every ideology he accepts under the weight of his experiences when taken to their logical conclusion. (goodreads)
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American author who wrote nearly 100 books and other works across a number of genres. Sinclair's work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle, which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." He is remembered for writing the famous line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."
