Episode Details

Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover in Chicago's slaughterhouses to expose the human cost of unregulated industrial capitalism. When The Jungle was published in 1906, the nation panicked about its breakfast sausage instead. He aimed for the heart and, as he put it, hit the stomach, giving birth to the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act rather than the socialist awakening he wanted.

This episode traces the split-screen childhood between a vermin-infested boarding house and his grandparents' Baltimore mansion, his entry to City College at 14, the pulp-fiction grind that had him dictating up to 8,000 words a day, and the undercover reporting that dodged Pinkerton detectives. We then follow his 1934 EPIC campaign for governor of California, the fake newsreels Hollywood studios produced to defeat him, the Helicon Home Colony that burned down, his telepathy experiments in Mental Radio, his rigid diet, and the Lanny Budd series that won a Pulitzer Prize.

• How seeing both poverty and privilege up close convinced him class was a constructed reality
• Why writing cheap pulp fiction became the training ground for nearly 100 books
• How the EPIC campaign became the prototype for the modern negative attack ad
• His famous insight about why a person cannot understand something their paycheck depends on not understanding
• How Mental Radio helped lead to a parapsychology department at Duke University