San Francisco Bay Guardian News

Author Lauren Coodley. Courtesy Heyday Books.

So Coodley, a professor of labor and women's studies at Napa Community College, is demolishing that perception for good with an excellent sampling of his 50 years of passionate living, writing, and advocating in California. The title is The Land of Orange Groves and Jails, a phrase borrowed by Sinclair from the Wobblies during the days of their arrests under California's criminal syndicalism laws.

She catches the essence of Sinclair by providing key excerpts from the mountain of books (more than l00, many self-published), plays, letters, and manifestos that stand as his California legacy. Examples: the letter to the Los Angeles police chief after he was arrested for reading the Constitution at a rally defending the Wobblies in the famous dock strike at San Pedro in l923; parts of the famous Lanny Budd series of books written to support President Roosevelt and rouse the public to go to war against Hitler (the best scene: Budd, the anti-fascist spy, talks to William Randolph Hearst in his castle); the pamphlet and songs from Sinclair's dramatic run for governor in l934 with the pledge to end poverty in California (EPIC), the campaign that foreshadowed the New Deal; and a wonderful collection of vintage Sinclairana in historical context.

Coodley maintains that as "California faces new assaults on free speech, labor organizing, food safety, the natural environment, and the teaching of history, Sinclair has perhaps never been as relevant as he is right now." Buried in the text is a confirming quote from Sinclair's best-selling campaign pamphlet, "I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future." In it, Sinclair writes, "It is up to us to vindicate the principles of Democracy, and see to it that government of the people, by the people, and for the people does not perish from California."

This anthology makes clear that Sinclair deserves a good full-scale biography. I nominate Coodley for the job.

The Land of Orange Groves and Jails is published by Heyday Books and Santa Clara University for the California Legacy series. For more information on the Legacy project, go to www.californialegacy.org. Coodley's next appearance on her book tour will be at noon, Thursday, April 7, in the Creekside Room of the Dominican College, San Rafael. For more information on other appearances and her book, go to www.laurencoodley.com.

Bay Guardian: I think one of the interesting things about Upton Sinclair is how you find out about him. I found out about him in my first journalism class in 1953 from my professor by the name of Nathan Blumberg, who brought in The Brass Check and talked about it and what The Brass Check meant for journalism. So I'm curious when you as a historian and teacher found out about Sinclair and when you got interested.

Lauren Coodley: I actually didn't really find out about him until the mid 90's when I was asked to substitute at the last minute for a political science class, and that's not what my degree is in, and I was trying to figure out what to do with this class. Somebody handed me a film about the EPIC campaign called We have a plan, and I showed it to the students as a way of kind of starting a conversation about electoral issues. Anyway, I was just really stunned to realize that I grew up in California and had never heard of the EPIC campaign and my students were very excited by it and thought it was very inspiring

BG: That's significant. I'm from a little town in Iowa, population 2800, and went to University of Nebraska and I found out about him right away at age 18 – and I'd never even been to California. How can that be?

BG: I don't think they talked about it in journalism school either, although I can't be sure – they didn't when I was teaching there. Well, the reason I asked you that is because I think it's significant. You've been around, you're a historian, you went to Berkeley, and you didn't hear about Upton Sinclair until the middle 90's.

LC: That's true; I didn't. My original education was not in history at Berkeley, I should say. I didn't get educated in history until the mid 90's when I went back to graduate school in Sonoma State.

BG: Ecology? Well, then you're excused. How did you happen to do the book and the selections and so forth?

LC: I'll try to give as concise an answer as I can. I decided to write my master's thesis called "Toward a Reinterpretation of Upton Sinclair" because I felt that he had not been treated well by his previous biographers. So I wrote a thesis on what should be in the biography and how to look at him from a different perspective that I would say is probably more historical-political than his previous biographers have done. So I did all that work and a huge amount of research on his temperance beliefs and his connections to Hollywood and his labor involvement and his interest in health – all the issues that are now in my book were in my master's thesis – and I tried to get a documentary film made on Upton Sinclair and ran into some financing problems and had to abandon that. I did that for a few years, and then I got a few grants from the California Council for Humanities. So when that didn't work out, I basically went back to work at the college and a few years passed. Then I happened to meet at a college function the poet Dana Gioia, who's now the head of the NEA, and he has a big interest in Upton Sinclair. We got to talking, and he put me in touch with Heyday Books, and they suggested that I make a book proposal for their California Legacy series.

Why Sinclair faded away

LC: They'd published collections of other California writers, but this is their first Sinclair book.

LC: It is interesting, isn't it? Yes. You know it's because, in my opinion, he's not – although he's a very good stylist and an interesting writer, he's also a number of other things, so his writing is often seen as not as polished, or – I don't know, I think it's the way political writers sometimes get seen as second rate because they put their art in service of their ideology.

BG: H.L. Mencken, the famous cultural writer and journalist, said that Upton Sinclair was chasing butterflies into a box canyon. He said that kind of wryly because he liked Sinclair, but the politics were a little too much for him. Is that what you're getting at?

LC: I think that Sinclair is part of a tradition of writers who try to improve humanity with their work and try to draw attention to injustice through their work. I mean – it's a tradition that includes Uncle Tom's Cabin and many other socially relevant works, you know, Dickens, etc. I was not primarily interested in him as a writer initially. I was interested in him as a social activist. But I came to respect the way that he used his art to draw attention to a whole range of issues.

The bee was the symbol of the EPIC movement; the slogan
"I Produce - I Defend" referred to Sinclair's concept of "pro-
duction for use," which would turnfields over to farmers and
factories to workers.Courtesy Heyday Books.

LC: What I think is that writers and radical thinkers and men who are radical thinkers kind of get put into a box with a bunch of stereotypes, and Upton Sinclair defies all those stereotypes, so people really don't know what to do with him. You know, they have Jack London and Ernest Hemingway – the brawlers, the womanizers, the drinkers, the two-fisted guys, and all that – and he wasn't any of that, and I think it's disturbing to people to think about.

BG: Well, there's F. Scott Fitzgerald who's living – oh probably in the same time that Sinclair was – and all he wrote was one novel on Hollywood, but even that didn't come out until later, and there've been all kinds of stories about him, myths about him, etc., and Sinclair was down there for 50 years.

LC: I know! We just had a huge Dashiell Hammett thing in San Francisco. I think that he epitomizes those of us who are lifelong political activists. Our stories are actually very seldom told or studied, as opposed to certain writers who are kind of decadent and self-indulgent whose stories get told quite often, so that's one way of looking at it. There's a lot of forgotten America.

Lanny Budd, Roosevelt, and Hearst

BG: The Lanny Budd series. I have known about Sinclair for years and years and I have never heard of Lanny Budd. We called over to Christopher Books here in San Francisco, and I thought I'd get a bunch of the books, but they aren't easy to get! There're a couple that are several hundred dollars because they're rare and all that sort of thing, and it's hard to believe that as well known as he was at the time – and he did get the Pulitzer Prize, didn't he? – that that series is not available.

LC: I know. I'm not an expert on how books go out of print, although I know it happens fairly easily, but it's kind of shocking that most of Upton Sinclair is out of print. I know that less well known writers regularly go out of print, and I expect to go out of print myself.

BG: I guess what I'm getting at is I think there's something culturally significant here, politically significant here.

LC: Well, you know, the Huntington turned down his papers, and we don't have an Upton Sinclair home, and we don't have a sense of him as a cultural icon that people study. It's more significant to me that there's no Upton Sinclair conference. There's no scholarly journal. There're no people doing dissertation research. And, as I said, there's no home that people visit, so all of those things conspire together to not keep his books in print. Maybe that's what drives books out of print is the fact that there isn't a sort of scholarly collection of people working on him.

LC: I hope we get the chance! I want to write a real biography and my book is biographical, but it's mostly designed to reintroduce his writing.

BG: In fact, one that interested me particularly was the recounting of a visit, in one of the Lanny Budd series, to the Hearst Castle. He was talking to Hearst, and Hearst offered to give him some money to keep him in touch with what was going on in Nazi Germany and so forth. And, oddly enough, I had just been down to the Hearst Castle for the first time, and then I read the piece in your book. As far as I can tell, having just been there, it was a pretty good rendition, a pretty good account of what it would be like to talk to Hearst in the Castle.

LC: I think people felt like they learned about the world from his books. The Lanny Budd series was designed to introduce the working class readership through popular fiction to really what the world was. He wrote to hundreds of thousands of people and got detailed descriptions of everything.

LC: I guess you would say it was reported, but he probably got some stories from the Hollywood crowd, from people like Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who were his friends.

BG: Where do you think he got the idea for Lanny Budd and doing it that way? I mean was it based on a real character do you think?

LC: In my research, some people think it was based on Cornelius Vanderbilt, who he called Neil Vanderbilt. He had a lot of friends who were wealthy young men of conscience, like Lanny. And Gaylord Wilshire was a very close friend. So his favorite character was this young, privileged, naïve man who discovers the truth about the world and then has to struggle with his conscience about whose side is he going to be on and what's he going to do about what he's realized. Someone who wants to just enjoy art and music and feels like he can't ignore the struggles of the oppressed, that's really his favorite kind of character, who he uses in most of his books.

BG: You know, when I read that, I thought of Herman Wouk and The Winds of War and that series.

BG: Remember Robert Mitchum as Pug going here and going there and being a confidant of Roosevelt?

LC: It's very similar. In fact, people think that Wouk basically copied the Lanny Budd books. It hasn't been alleged, but ...

BG: See, that's interesting because if he did – I mean I'm not a Herman Wouk aficionado, I've read the books and seen the movies – I never saw that that was ever mentioned, that this could come from the Lanny Budd series.

LC: People have told me that they think the idea was essentially stolen, but then if you do the same style and motif with a different named character, I guess it's hard to make a legal case. Certainly he made it a little less political.

LC: I see the Lanny Budd books as kind of an extended Casablanca kind of thing where the person who's trying to stay out of it keeps getting drawn in and drawn in and has to choose an allegiance over and over again. You know, he's the son of this arms manufacturer and he's very close to George Bernard Shaw, and you know how Shaw was haunted by the whole idea of the role of arms manufacturers. Keeping the world going to war.

BG: Now, there are 11 altogether, how does one get all 11 books? It looks to me like it's a pretty daunting task.

LC: I would call Bolerium Books in San Francisco. They've been very helpful to me in getting all kinds of obscure Upton Sinclair stuff over the years. And some collectors have these books. I have the complete set.

BG: I think a lot of people, once they get into it, will want to get more.

LC: Yes, I know that my brother found some books for me at Powell's in Oregon.

Everywhere that EPIC clubs met, people sang this and other songs to
strengthen their commitment to the campaign. Courtesy Heyday Books.

Sinclair runs for governor in the EPIC campaign

BG: Now, the EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign, when Sinclair ran for governor of California in 1934. There was a book on that a while back which I thought was pretty good. As a historian, what is your hit on the campaign and what it meant? What are the ramifications today and so forth?

LC: I think it was a really important cultural phenomenon for California – I should say political and cultural. It sort of popped the bubble of Republican control of the governorship, because although Sinclair lost, within four years – I think it's Cuthbert Olson who came in as the governor – the democratic governor came in, and a lot of the EPIC ideas were put into place through the new deal through Roosevelt. So I would say that it was a tremendous organizing effort within California that I analogize to Howard Dean's organizing effort within the Democratic Party. It was something that got people really excited. In fact, my daughter suggested we call the campaign "the original meet up," which I thought was pretty cute. You know, people got together, they sang songs, they organized, they put out newsletters, they organized parades, floats, rodeos, et cetera. And for the people who went through it, it was the most profound experience of their lives – the people who were very involved in the campaign who are now in their eighties or nineties.

BG: Interesting because those of us who follow these things politically, in looking at it, in looking at history, we're surprised to find that Roosevelt, the New Deal president, actually worked to defeat Sinclair.

LC: I would say that he stayed neutral, whether he could have been more helpful ... According to the sources I've looked at, I think that they were a little afraid of Upton Sinclair. Like I said, he was the Howard Dean of the whole situation where you might say – things, I know, have moved to the right – Franklin Roosevelt was more like a Bill Clinton, if you know what I mean. Roosevelt had a certain agenda and he was afraid that if it seemed too veering, he wouldn't get it through. So he was a little afraid of Upton Sinclair, who popped out of nowhere as a socialist turned democrat for the elections. So some of his advisers urged him to keep his distance, and he did. That's kind of how I see it.

LC: He does, because Lanny Budd becomes an agent for Roosevelt and has many meetings with him.

BG: Did he ever hold it against Roosevelt that Roosevelt never helped him with the campaign?

LC: No, absolutely not. He loved him. He was a huge admirer. He wrote the Lanny Budd books to help Roosevelt persuade the nation to go to war against Germany. He was very sympathetic to the problems Roosevelt was having in rousing the nation out of its isolationism, and he specifically wrote the series to push people into wanting to be interventionists.

BG: And is it clear from your research that he really did want to move the country to war?

LC: Oh yes – other people have called it the first anti-fascist spy series. Dieter Herms, who was a German critic, thought that the San Francisco Mime Troupe was doing stuff that was so much like Upton Sinclair's plays that he brought the Mime Troupe to Germany and had them tour. He was one of the people who called the Lanny Budd books "the anti-fascist spy series." So he recognized that that was what Sinclair was doing in the books.

Why Sinclair supported Prohibition

BG: Now you argue that Sinclair based his politics on his personal life. What do you mean by that?

LC: I think that he had some political ideas that were a reflection of the personal struggles he went through with both his health and his father's alcoholism. So, to him, both of those things became political issues – both health and alcohol.

BG: Had his father been a normal drinker, he wouldn't have done that, you think?

LC: No, I don't think so. I think he saw the ravages of alcoholism up close and personal.

LC: He saw more what alcoholism did to a lot of his friends and contemporaries. George Sterling, he was very close to Jack London, Eugene Debbs – all alcoholics. He was really distraught at what he thought was a waste of so much human talent.

BG: But he must have realized that you can't just stamp out alcoholism by prohibiting it. All that did was create all kinds of social mafia type problems that remain with us today. What would he have said now? If we legalized marijuana in California, we wouldn't have any more tax problems.

LC: I think what he would say is, first of all, he'd probably see that as a very practical way to address the budget.

LC: Yes. And also he was very sympathetic to medical alternatives, so the whole medical marijuana movement, I'm sure, would meet with his warm sympathy.

BG: But what about people just regularly smoking marijuana just like they smoke a Havana cigar or a cigarette?

LC: I think he would judge any substance on what it actually does to the individual, and, as we generally know, marijuana isn't as bad for your health as alcohol, and it certainly doesn't cause the family trauma. People spending all their earnings and leaving people destitute – that's the kind of thing that made people support Prohibition, and obviously it didn't turn out the way people had hoped, but that's been true for a lot of the things. Like women getting the vote – the women who fought for it thought it would bring certain things about, which it didn't.

BG: What about cigarettes and gambling, the other sumptuary crimes, did he have positions on all of them?

LC: I'm not aware of his positions on either of those two. I know that he was opposed to free love, even though in the '34 campaign he was smeared for supporting it.

LC: He was part of the free spirited bohemians of the early 20th century, and he saw a lot of trauma as a result of non-monogamy and felt ultimately that it was better for political people to live as sane a life as possible so that they could have credibility in the world. I've mentioned that I was very impressed with his friendships and support for women activists, which is really hard when you're not a trustworthy man and you don't have credibility and you're not able to give support to other activists. I think that was a very important part of his life.

Sinclair needs a good biographer

BG: How do biographers shape the public perception of their subjects and how has that affected Sinclair's reputation?

LC: He had two biographers, one in his life, Floyd Dell, in 1927, wrote a very sympathetic, strong picture of him as a friend and a contemporary. And then his second real biographer was a guy named Leon Harris who was a staff writer for Cosmopolitan magazine and who wrote a big biography of him in '75, which is still what most people go to when they want to read about his life. So this guy who wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine had no intellectual or theoretical tools with which to understand Sinclair; he just wrote basically a, what would you call it, a

Hundreds of thousands of these "dollars" printed in red ink
were circulated throughout California. Courtesy Heyday Books

BG: Would you rather do a book or a movie or an HBO series, or does it make any difference? I guess the book is first, huh?

BG: Let's say that the Bay Guardian is a major book publisher, and we talk to Lauren Coodley, and we say, "How would you go about doing this biography that would restore Sinclair's proper place in history and politics?" How would you answer that? If you had to do me a three-page memo to try to get me to put up several million dollars to do this biography, how would you sell it? How would you market it?

LC: I guess I would say that the emerging fields of gender and cultural history give us new theoretical tools. And I'm sorry if that sounds really pretentious, but I don't think that he could be understood until we had gone through the things we have gone through in the last 20-30 years. The sort of collapse of the counter culture and the various social movements that we have all participated in – I think that they have given at least me a way of explaining and understanding Upton Sinclair that ranges from his feelings about diet to his interest in psychic stuff to his interest in ecology to his interest in labor. Rather than seeing those as a bunch of bizarre causes that have no relation to each other, I think that I understand him as being very similar to people I know that are interested in all those issues, that work on all those fronts.

BG: And you're also saying that this is a book that properly done could be a major seller of some type? In other words, the market might be ready for it?

LC: Yes. There's a biography of Jefferson or Adams about every two years. Why is it that it's been 35 years and there hasn't been one of Upton Sinclair. I mean, you can get the answer to that question, but obviously, it's long overdue.

BG: So who are some of the personalities that epitomize Sinclair's use of celebrity to promote progressive causes?

LC: Michael Moore, Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon – that's a quick summary. Let's see if I can come up with a few others...

BG: They're all kind of...Hollywood types. Anybody in print, journalism, novelists? Norman Mailer? Is he a possibility?

LC: Actually, I think people who write popular fiction, like John Grisham, although people don't see him as very important. He tries to educate his readers about issues like race and certainly the tobacco industry in his book that was made into a movie recently with Dustin Hoffman. Runaway Jury was all about the tobacco industry, actually, although I think Runaway Jury transposed it into a thing about guns. But he tries in all his books to reach regular readers who just want entertainment, and that's really, as an artist, what Sinclair did. As a public figure, he went down and got arrested consistently with people to draw attention to their lives. So maybe Sean Penn... yeah, I tend to think of Hollywood people more as being like him. I have to think about writers who are like him, reporters who are like him. Greg Palast is like him. There's a reporter who's like him. Don't you think?

BG: I heard Palast speak a while back. He kept going on and on about how the election was stolen, but he was a little short on the evidence. This was a couple days after the election.

BG: My feeling about Sinclair is he, for all of his fictionalizing, he had a real respect for facts and telling things as they actually were. I always thought he'd be a very good reporter. And I think the reason he wasn't considered a good reporter was that he became a novelist.

Sinclair nauseated America with his account of the Chicago meatpacking
industry in "The Jungle," published in 1906. It was later made into a
film, which first screened in 1921. Courtesy Heyday Books.

BG: I just have a theory I just want to put out. When he did The Brass Check, he alienated publishers of newspapers from Hearst on up and down and the Pulitzers of the era, and then he would take positions on strikes, for labor and against capital. And either one of those are kind of fatal sins in terms of the establishment in the U. S.; and when you put the two together, you almost get on the blacklist in one form or another – and I'm just curious, as a historian, if this makes some sense to you.

Sinclair publishes his own books

LC: One issue that I think is noteworthy is that, of course, he decided to self-publish, and he actually was able to support himself and have a fairly decent income despite all of these positions that might seem so antithetical. I mean it's interesting to think that with less corporate concentration, somebody like him could actually get published and get read widely.

BG: And how in the world did he do this? Did he see it all the way through – the printing, the marketing, the distribution?

LC: He had a little publishing company in Pasadena. I think all through the 20's and 30's he self-published.

LC: I would think that they were advertised in little periodicals. Of course you know there were so many little newspapers in those days.

BG: I think it would be quite a feat to do that, which shows that he was a bit of an entrepreneur and, essentially, a publisher.

LC: Well remember when his book, Oil!, was banned in Boston because it had a scene about birth control, so he went there and paraded around and he put a fig leaf around the book, I believe. So he drove publicity to the book that way. And yes, he promoted himself. That's one of the things he's been criticized for and derided for, but he did promote himself because he felt he had some ideas that were very urgently needed. As to whether he was blacklisted, it doesn't seem to me that he was, despite the fact that he had enough enemies that he lost the election, he only barely lost the election. He almost won. He got 900 thousand votes in California. That was pretty much after he had written his most shocking books.

BG: But most of the papers in the state endorsed against him, so he got the votes despite a lot of opposition in the press and with the movie industry.

LC: Yeah, the movie industry was split. MGM was Republican and Warner Brothers was Democratic, so MGM worked very hard against him and created those fake newsreels that, I think, ultimately did him in, with the whole [issue about] unemployed people coming into the state, the whole vision of that.

The wimp factor

BG: Sinclair's interest in food, health, psychology, feminism, all these things that you mentioned – have they been misunderstood and distorted by male critics and biographers?

LC: I think that – without going into the gender of the critics and biographers, who happen to have been male – I think that mistake could have been made by women as well; it's not like something that happened because they were male. It's just that feminist critics have tended to work on women and restoring women into the historical narrative, and so men have sort of been neglected by feminist historians, and Sinclair is a man who would benefit from a reappraisal and a reframing from a feminist perspective.

LC: Well, I used to teach psychology. With the new book about the wimp factor I think there's a lot of interest now in masculinity, the Schwarzenegger thing and the Bush thing, the Kerry thing and how people relate to men and see men.

LC: The Wimp Factor is a new book by Stephen Ducat, he's a professor at New College. It's a whole analysis of how gender, male gender especially, is perceived and masculinity is used in American history and American culture.

BG: I think it's interesting that you talk as a feminist historian and you want to restore the job that the male historians have done on Sinclair.

LC: Male historians have barely paid attention to Sinclair. It's mostly been male literary critics and pretty apolitical people who just find him, I guess they called him an "odd duck," or you know, kind of fussy, namby pamby... There's just a lot of uncomfortableness with some of these issues that I think lots of thinking people easily embrace, whether it's ecology or food; among Californians, they're the stuff of life, aren't they.

BG: Are you saying that he represents a different template of radical masculinity?

LC: Not everybody agrees with me on this, but basically – and I'm interested in engaging in a dialogue with people about it – but, as I said, I think we have this template or this stereotype that men who are radical are brawlers, drinkers, womanizers, abusers of people, egotistical. They're Jack Kerouac or they're Norman Mailer – they're somebody who's not very sensitive and not very thoughtful. That's an unfortunate stereotype, and I think that Sinclair defies it and, for people who are looking for different ways of being a man, he offered one, shall we say.

BG: Can go through the Boy Scout code? Where does he miss out, or does he have them all?

BG: You know, the Boy Scout code – I used to know it, but I can't recite it – you know, reverent, clean, brave, et cetera...

LC: I think he tried to be honorable. I think he tried to be a gentleman and to be honorable. I think a lot of men are like that these days. I don't think he's that unusual. And I think that radical men have rethought some of the more macho posturing that characterized the 60's. I think that men have changed, and I think that Sinclair would be very comfortable with those changes.

BG: What would he think about Hunter Thompson? Or what would you think about Hunter Thompson in the Sinclair spirit?

LC: I think that is a really interesting question. I guess that Sinclair would love Hunter Thompson's writing, and he'd be sad about his – whatever aspects of his behavior were self-destructive. You know, I don't know the truth about his death and I wouldn't want to speculate on whether his alcoholism or abuse of alcohol or simply the political realities we're living in were responsible, but I think he might remind Sinclair of a lot of his friends, like Jack London, who died way too early and lived a very chaotic life. Hunter Thompson didn't die early, but he chose to end his life, and that's always a sad thing for his admirers.

Sinclair is more relevant than ever

BG: You've received much positive press, but you did get a review in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat that was harshly critical of Sinclair.

LC: Yes, I did, and that was disappointing. A few people think that I'm not critical enough of Upton Sinclair. They don't understand that Sinclair was derided by his biographer, and I'm trying to restore a certain sense of fairness. They think a biographer's role should be to reveal the dirty secrets of any given personality. Also, this review attacked the EPIC plan. Many of us are still largely ignorant of the accomplishments of the New Deal in California, which the EPIC plan foretold. My friend, Gray Brechin, is doing a massive excavation on this topic, and we'll be speaking together with Dick Walker of [the] UC Department of Geography about our new work on May 19 at Black Oak Books in Berkeley. What I hope for out of this, whether I do the biography or not, is I really think there should be an Upton Sinclair house in Los Angeles.

LC: His last home in Monrovia is in private ownership. He tried to will it to the United Auto Workers, and his son persuaded him to change his will and keep it within the family, and then it got sold.

LC: He disagreed with his support for the UAW. Sinclair actually said that he was going to leave it for them to be a center for study of social justice issues.

LC: Actually, during the '34 campaign his son was very angry at him for leaving the socialist party. But this is not a part of his life that I've studied a lot, about his later years and his relationship with his son. I sort of have stayed away from the personal stuff, the inter-family stuff, because the other biographers have been pretty obsessed with it. And I've been more interested in his political life and his ideas rather than that kind of stuff.

BG: To sum up, here you are in 2005, writing about a guy who became famous for a lot of us in – what, 1906? – and for me with The Brass Check. How in the world is he still relevant after all these years? Because his political ideas have been out there, but there must be something more than that.

BG: Mark was more of a real writer than Sinclair was, wasn't he? I mean, I shouldn't put words in your mouth, but how would you...

LC: Yes. I think his best work, you know, like Oil!, the Lanny Budd series, some of his journalism, sure. I think he was a really great writer. So, I think that he should be remembered for lots of reasons, both his life and his work. We don't ask whether all kinds of people from the past are still relevant. That's history, that's what we study is the past; we use it to inform our decisions today, hopefully.

BG: I guess I didn't state my point that clearly, because what I meant was if he were just a political writer and had no literary value, he would have been long forgotten, as a lot of political writers have been.

BG: So if you get a chance to do the book, what more work do you have to do on it? Do you have to do a lot more research? Do you have to read everything you wrote?

LC: You are a very perceptive interviewer. What I would do is I would go back to the Lily Library in Bloomington, Indiana. I've been there before – that's where his collection is. And I would have an outline for certain issues that I want to highlight, and I would go into the archives and read the letters and look at his papers and spend some months there. I would do some additional research, but I think I have pretty much the rough outlines of what the book would be already.

BG: Well, I hope you do it, he does need a good biographer. My god! This is a major project, it'll take you years, won't it? To do it right?

LC: A scholar who is reviewing my book for the L.A. Times actually has just written a new biography of him, which Random House is publishing in 2006. So, there is going to be a new biography in 2006. Tony Arthur, who wrote it, is reviewing my book for the L.A. Times. I'm still hoping that I can write another biography. He has done a lot of original research, but that doesn't mean that there isn't room for my own interpretation.