Present day Baruch College students often juggle work and school to accomplish their dream of graduating college. Today, the City University of New York charges modest tuition, but in the days of Upton Sinclair, tuition and books were all free at the College of the City of New York. To cover any extra expenses and to help his family he began to write stories. His first was accepted by the publication, Argosy, for which he earned $25.00!

Our family fortunes happened to be at a low ebb just then, so I fell to digging in this new gold mine. I found several papers that bought children’s stories at low prices; also, before long, I discovered another gold mine-writing jokes for the comic papers. At seventeen, jokes were my entire means of support. My mother and I spent that winter on West 23rd Street, near the river. My weekly budget was this: for a top-story hallroom in a lodging-house, one dollar twenty-five; for two meals a day at an eating house, three dollars; and for a clean collar and other luxuries, twenty-five cents. It seems a slender allowance, but you must remember that I had infinite riches in the little room of the college library. (Autobiography, p.32)

 

Upton writes in his Autobiography that “My jokes became an obsession… I kept my little notebook before me at meals, while walking, while dressing, and in classes if the professor was a bore” (p.35).

Many of Upton’s writings as a young man while still enrolled at the College of the City of New York were kept in a scrapbook by his mother, who preserved almost 150 items such as cartoon captions, riddles, stories, and poems (Gottesman, Upton Sinclair: An Annotated Checklist, p.1-2). We are fortunate to have obtained copies of a few of these rare writings of Upton Sinclair as an adolescent from the archives of Indiana University.

 

 

By the end of the nineteenth century newspapers were being published across the country in every town, village and city. New York City had many popular newspapers and Upton Sinclair is known to have been a contributor to the New York Evening Post and the New York Evening Journal. However, he also tried his luck across the river in Brooklyn, which at the time was an independent city. It was not until 1898 that Brooklyn became consolidated into Greater New York City.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, published since 1841, was an excellent outlet for his writing. One of his riddles is found in an 1895 issue of the newspaper.

 

Upton Sinclair’s graduated on June 24, 1897 from the College of the City of New York. He intended to go on to law school but decided first to enroll at Columbia University to study literature and philosophy.

 

To support himself while a student at Columbia University he began writing for Street and Smith, publishers of pulp fiction and general interest titles. He began his new venture writing for Army and Navy Weekly, “a five-cent publication with bright red and blue and green and yellow covers, which the firm was just starting” (Autobiography, p. 49). He wrote using the pseudonym Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, and his writings were called the Mark Mallory stories. The first of these stories actually appeared 5 days before he graduated from City College, on June 19, 1897!

 

Life After the College of the City of New York

His Mark Mallory stories proved very successful and Sinclair was paid forty dollars per story–an acceptable sum at the end of the nineteenth century. He soon was asked to write more stories, and this time, under the pseudonym Ensign Clarke Fitch, he wrote a small novel every week. This led to other offers by other publishers for his writings and his writing career was launched. “Not merely was I earning a living and putting away a little money; I had a sense of fun, and these adventures were a romp” (Autobiography, p.51).