Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Upton Sinclair was a man who put his money where his mouth is: he used the $30,000 dollars he made off The Jungle's huge success to found a utopian community called Helicon Hall in Englewood, New Jersey. It was an experiment in communal living that lasted about five months before burning to the ground under mysterious circumstances (source).
So, we all know that Upton Sinclair ends The Jungle advocating that everyone vote socialist in the next election. Well, even though the novel sold like hotcakes around the world, when Sinclair ran as a Socialist Party candidate in New Jersey the year that The Jungle was published, he only got 750 out of 24,000 votes. Unfortunately for Upton Sinclair, people were not reading The Jungle for its socialist message (source).
The 2007 Academy Award-winning milkshake fest There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, was based on Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!