Jimmie Higgins

by Upton Sinclair

Jimmie Higgins is the fellow who does the hard work in the job of waking up the workers. Jimmie hates war--all war--and fights against it with heart and soul. But war comes, and Jimmie is drawn into it, whether he will or no. He has many adventures--strikes, jails, munitions explosions, draft-boards, army-camps, submarines and battles. "Jimmie Higgins Goes to War" at last, and when be does he holds back the German army and wins the battle of "Chatty Terry." But then they send him into Russia to fight the Bolsheviki, and there "Jimmie Higgins Votes for Democracy." Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

Genres: Classics, American, Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific 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. The Jungle has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. 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 the initial 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." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated.

Reviews

[Homunculus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upton Sinclair schafft es mal wieder meisterlich, das Leben der Menschen in Amerika um die Zeit des ersten Weltkrieges anschaulich darzustellen anhand des Lebens von Jimmie Higgins.
Upton Sinclair war ja ein großer Verfechter des Sozialismus, dies wird in diesem Buch wieder stark thematisiert. Dies vielleicht als einziger Kritikpunkt, da es doch stark in den Vordergrund rückt.
Ansonsten ist es wieder ein tolles Buch, in dem man viel über das Land und die Menschen zu dieser Zeit erfährt.

[Mike Zickar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting but lesser novel (he had a lot of lessers!) in the Sinclair oeuvre. The book focuses on Jimmie Higgins, a machinist and loyal member of his local Socialist party. The book follows the tribulations of Higgins over a wide range of disasters (and a few triumphs) and Sinclair works through much of his complex ambivalence about WWI and the American involvement through the second half of the novel.

The book is an interesting historical document about American Socialism in the early 20th century as well as American's complex attitudes about WWI. The beginning and the end of the book were page turnovers though the middle of the book was a slog.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You could not be indifferent to the war, you could not be of two minds about it. And yet--Jimmie Higgins was of two minds! He wanted to beat back the Huns, who had made all this fearful mess; but also he wanted to beat the profiteers who were making messes at home."

I think a lot of Americans don't realize just how tumultuous the beginning of the 20th century actually was. Anarchism, socialism, labor unrest, rapacious imperialism, military buildup - and Jimmie Higgins is dead center in the middle of it.

This "bowed, undernourished little man" meets presidential candidates royalty, incites strikes wherever he goes, loses everything multiple times - it's exhausting, really, but damn engaging.

This is the most complex novel by Sinclair that I've read. I love Sinclair and I'm a socialist myself but he often strikes me as naive, if not willfully so. This novel seems to reflect Sinclair's attempt at reflecting the world back to itself through the eyes of an eagerly devoted proletarian idealist. Imagine Forrest Gump as a devoted working class agitator in the 1910s and you're probably not even close - my favorite Upton Sinclair novel, by far.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Jimmie Higgins starts out as a meek quiet socialist hanger-on who sets up the chairs for meetings, sweeps up after, and doesn't say much. By the end of the book Jimmie has developed and grown into a conscious and defiant fighter for his class. Jimmie is a true working class hero. I was, and still am, hugely moved by this book.