Sinclair’s was also an age when writers, both journalists and novelists, were experiencing a thrilling sense of their own efficacy. The investigative… - Upton Sinclair

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Sinclair’s was also an age when writers, both journalists and novelists, were experiencing a thrilling sense of their own efficacy. The investigative exposé — what President Theodore Roosevelt would unflatteringly dub “muckraking,” after the character in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) who could “look no way but downward, with a muckrake in his hands” — had taken the magazine and publishing world by storm, had grabbed hold of the popular reader, and was shining a bright light on the ever-darkening realms of child labor, prisons, insurance companies, and, foremost, American enterprise and its role in the creation of a new American class of impoverished industrial wage slaves.