Upton Sinclair by Floyd Dell

I.

In this manner he earned his living and helped support his mother, until he was twenty. He had finished college at the age of eighteen, "passing comfortably near the bottom of his class", and had entered Columbia University as a graduate student. During these years, he had written millions of words of hackwork -- a total bulk, he had estimated it, equal to the complete works of Sir Walter Scott! The psychology of the period that immediately follows could not well be understood without taking that fact into consideration. It is obscured in his own autobiographical novel, _Love's Pilgrimage_, and does not at all enter into the quasi-autobiographical _Journal of Arthur Stirling_. Both of these books tell of the frantic and frenzied struggles of a young writer for self-realization in the midst of poverty. In neither of these books will the young writer solve the problem of poverty by doing any other kind of work except writing: and this "no compromise" attitude, when carried to such extreme lengths as it is in these books, alienates a good deal of the sympathies of the reader. One is better able to understand such reckless and wilful intransigence when one realizes that this is the maddened rebellion of an over-driven hack. All work and no play may make Jack a dull boy, when Jack is an ordinary citizen; but if Jack feels himself to be an artist, too much hackwork and no opportunity for creative self-expression makes him go berserk. It is the artist's revolt against slavery; and like any slave-revolt it is likely to be marked by "red ruin and the breaking up of homes". It is these years of successful literary drudgery, these millions of meaningless and merely saleable words, that explain the ruthless singleness of artistic purpose in the face of every obstacle and in defiance of common sense. It is this situation which explains the extraordinary combination of abnormal personal sensitiveness with an inhuman indifference to all opposing human claims, whether in himself or in others who are dear to him; and it not merely explains but, more than anything else, serves to excuse the belief, on the part of the young man himself, that the frightful excesses of his morbid egotism are symptoms of "genius".