Roman Holiday

by Upton Sinclair

Upton Sinclair writes in a wide-eyed way that is reminiscent of Little Rollo. but the things he writes about are not Rollo-esque. If a civilization could be destroyed by "indicting" it, Indicter Sinclair would long since have left not one stone upon another.

Genres: Classics

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1931

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

[Benj FitzPatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of me wants to explicate each and every connection to current USA politics, but that would quickly descend into drudgery for all involved. In short, the ties between Sinclair's views in the 1930s and occupy wall street, which is currently taking place, are remarkable. He has captured something of the essence of American politics that transcends the better part of a century. While I would like to credit him with prognostic foresight, perhaps the similarities indicate just how little some of the fundamental viewpoints have changed over the years. I think this is well worth reading for the above reasons (as a novel it was interesting, but not overly noteworthy. That being said, he does a pretty good Stephen Colbert style lampooning, far before Colbert was even born).

[Erik Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was very impressed by Sinclair's The Jungle when we were assigned to read it in high school. My family had known a Polish couple in rural Michigan, the Slaviks, since the first world war. They had worked in the slaughter houses in Chicago after immigrating, but had moved to the country for health reasons. The book, their stories about their early years in the States had coalesced powerfully in my imagination. Besides, I knew that Sinclair had been a socialist politician--a plus, given my background.

I was motivated to pick up Roman Holiday because of thie prejudice in favor of Sinclair and because I had long been interested in Roman history, in Greco-Roman antiquity in general. Perhaps Sinclair could sympathetically flesh out the era for me.

As it happened, he didn't. Sinclair evinced little knowledge about the period and its culture in this polemical time travel tale.