American Leftie

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, by Anthony Arthur (Random House, 400 pp., $27.95)

TIMED to coincide with the centenary of Upton Sinclair’s best-known book, The Jungle, his exposé of the meatpacking industry, Anthony Arthur’s Radical Innocent chronicles the long, quixotic life of the prolific novelist and socialist gadfly. Neither hagiographic nor condescending, Arthur is an exemplary biographer, interested in human beings for their own sake, in all their unvarnished oddity.