King Coal

by Upton Sinclair, Nicholas Henson (Introduction)

Overview

Hal Warner may be a rich kid, but even he can see that the working conditions in the Colorado coal mines are inhumane. Inspired by real-life events, King Coal follows Hal's undercover exploration of the coal industry and his attempts to unionize the workers. Like Upton Sinclair's more famous novel The Jungle (1906), this 1917 novel highlights the often unfair and unsafe conditions experienced by working-class Americans in the early 20th century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942885061
Publisher:	Hastings College
Publication date:	06/01/2015
Pages:	390
Sales rank:	981,652
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr. (September 20, 1878 - November 25, 1968), was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). It exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free press" in the United States. Four years after the initial publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Sinclair also ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Socialist, and was the Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California in 1934, though his highly progressive campaign was defeated rather soundly.

Editorial Reviews

King Coal (1917) is to the mining world what Sinclair's The Jungle is to the meat-packing industry. Through protagonist Hal Warner, Sinclair reveals the abuses faced by immigrant mine workers.

Library Journal