By Tom Gallagher

THIS COULD BE a big year for reading California political literature. There are, after all, a whole lot of electoral activists out there coming off an election that frustrated them three times over. Anti-administration Californians shared the national frustration of George Bush's victory, following the disheartening experience of supporting John Kerry, a candidate who did not share their opposition to the ongoing Iraq war. And on top of that, they found the impact of their activities diminished by the Electoral College facts of life, in which winning California by one vote is just as good as winning it by a million. So some people who've never been involved before may just start checking out state politics, where at least everyone's vote counts the same. And for anyone looking for something completely different from the current Sacramento Schwarzenegger script, the Upton Sinclair story might be just the thing.

The Jungle, Sinclair's sensational muckraking novel of the Chicago stockyards, has kept his name current for 99 years now – even if he is perpetually confused with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. Yet the 50 years he spent in California, including his 1934 End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign, which created the most exciting gubernatorial race the state has yet seen, are relatively forgotten. Lifelong Californian Laura Coodley addresses this lapse of historical memory with a short annotated anthology of Sinclair's California writings, The Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair's California.

Coodley, who teaches California history at Napa Community College, considers it "incomplete to think about California in the twentieth century without turning to Upton Sinclair's work," which is frequently ignored or belittled because "official" or "establishment" California never did take to him. His archives went to Indiana, for instance, after the Huntington Library in Pasadena, his hometown, rejected them. (The chair of the library's board at that time was former Republican president and California governor Herbert Hoover, whose administrations embodied pretty much everything Sinclair worked against all of his life.)

Jack London called The Jungle "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery." London was certainly no disinterested reviewer – he and Sinclair had cofounded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society – but his judgment in naming it as one of two novels to visibly alter American politics has certainly stood up. And if the phrase "wage slavery" sounds archaic to us today, The Jungle's exposure of the working conditions in the era's meatpacking industry is a significant part of the reason why. Sinclair's arrest for picketing John D. Rockefeller's business offices in protest of the killing of miners, their wives, and children during the 1913 strike at Rockefeller's Ludlow, Colorado, coal mine was apparently the first time that the now-familiar tactic of taking political protest to corporate headquarters was ever employed. All of which is to say that when he moved to California in 1915, Sinclair was one famous guy, sufficiently well known that when three years later he founded a short-lived publication, he called it Upton Sinclair's Magazine, acknowledging that he was giving it "a name which some will call egotistical," but, he wrote, "this is no time for sham modesty. I have a certain trade-mark ... I must make use of ... [that] stands for Social Justice."

Sinclair's health was always a matter of concern, and he moved to southern California because "the climate makes it possible to be so much more active." And he clearly made the most of it. The local paper ranked him the eighth-best tennis player in Pasadena in 1926 – when he was 48 years old. Meanwhile, he found the time to fill 51 volumes of collected works.

Among Coodley's selections is an excerpt from Sinclair's 1924 play, The Singing Jailbirds (performed in New York City and Berlin), which dramatized a dock strike that had occurred the previous year. As a monument on the site in San Pedro reports, during the actual events, "Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading from the Bill of Rights to a large gathering." We also get a taste of Oil!, his widely read 1927 novel about the Harding administration's Teapot Dome scandal and "the class struggle in California"; the book was banned in Boston for its discussion of birth control.

Sinclair was never a Communist, as he explains in the book's title piece, but "a member of the Socialist Party, compelled to advertise Communists by the stupid persecutions to which they are subjected," in this case teachers at a Communist summer camp in San Bernadino County who were sentenced to San Quentin for "conspiracy to display a red flag or other emblem of opposition to organized government" in 1929. He actually stood three times as a Socialist Party candidate, including once for governor, but left the Socialists in 1934, after being persuaded that he had a legitimate shot at winning the Democratic gubernatorial primary and defeating Republican governor Frank Merriam, who had only recently replaced the deceased "Sunny Jim" Rolph.

As was to be expected, Sinclair wrote a book for the occasion: I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. But what no one could have expected was the 800 EPIC clubs that sprouted up, mostly in southern California, during this fifth year of the Great Depression. At one point weekly distribution of the EPIC News exceeded 1 million copies, and Sinclair won the primary handily.

Unfortunately, Sinclair's second campaign book was called I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked. If the Sinclair campaign mobilized California's working class and unemployed population like none before it, it motivated the state's wealthy even more. The Republicans hired the first ad agency ever brought into a political campaign, while MGM Studios produced anti-Sinclair shorts designed to look like real newsreels. MGM required theaters that distributed their films to show these shorts – an extremely powerful deceptive-advertising device in pre-television America.

Merriam won by 11 percentage points, but although Sinclair didn't personally repeat the effort, EPIC was no washout. Four years later Sinclair supporter Culbert Olson defeated Merriam to become the first Democratic governor in 40 years, and Sinclair's running mate, Sheridan Downey (the ticket was known as Uppie and Downey), was elected to the U.S. Senate.

Like most campaign literature, the anthology's selection from Sinclair's campaign writing is interesting mostly as an historical artifact. Unfortunately, it seems that since Sinclair's literary output was predominantly political fiction, people have come to assume that it too is now only of historical interest – more to be read about than actually read. But Coodley's excerpt from the 10 World's End novels Sinclair wrote from 1941 to 1953 suggests that this is decidedly not the case. Although the series is now virtually unknown, it sold more than a million copies, and the third book, Dragon's Teeth, won him the 1943 Pulitzer Prize. After reading this account of series hero Lanny Budd's evening spent at William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon castle in the company of his host and gossip columnist Louella Parsons, you'll wonder what other treats may be hidden away in this fictionalized history of the era of the two world wars.

The Land of Orange Groves and Jails documents a time when ideas mattered in California politics. And who knows? It might even happen again. It's no stranger than having a bodybuilder for a governor, is it?

Tom Gallagher is a San Francisco writer and Lit contributor.

The Land of Orange Groves and Jails: Upton Sinclair's California

Edited by Lauren Coodley. Heyday Books, 215 pages, $16.95 (paper).