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

Edited by Lauren Coodley

Novelist and muckraker Upton Sinclair will forever be associated with The Jungle, however, Sinclair deserves equal accolades for his entertaining critiques of Southern California's oil industry, movie studios, and urban sprawl—most of which still apply today. The Land of Orange Groves and Jails spans fifty years of Sinclair's funny and fiery writings. Taken together, these plays, novels, articles, and pamphlets show how Sinclair's personal life inspired his political activism.

This quintessential rabble-rouser has found an advocate in Lauren Coodley, a professor of history at Napa Valley College. Beginning with her dissertation, Coodley has spent nearly ten years studying Sinclair's life and writings. She has rethought how we view Upton Sinclair, both as a Californian and as a writer who turned his own life experiences into political pop culture.

Reviews

"Entertaining and instructive, like the demonstrated facts of Sinclair's equally implausible but real life, so effectively rendered in Coodley's imaginative anthology."—Los Angeles Times

"A must-read for students of literature, history, and political science."—Metroactive Books

"Thanks to this brilliant anthology, we can now realize that Upton Sinclair deserves to be considered in the company of Carey McWilliams as an astute and pivotal observer of Southern California in the first half of the twentieth century."—Kevin Starr, professor of history, University of Southern California
and State Librarian Emeritus

About the Editor

Lauren Coodley was born in Los Angeles, where her grandparents settled shortly after Upton Sinclair's arrival. She now lives in Napa with her two children, Nils and Caitlin. She teaches at Napa Community College, specializing in California labor and women's history as well as children's literature. She is the elected president of the faculty and a recipient of the McPherson Distinguished Teaching Award for 2003. She is the author of Napa: The Transformation of an American Town (Arcadia Publishing, 2004).