My head is swimming

Reading the bio of Upton Sinclair is at once a dizzying, humbling, mind-boggling experience, seeing what an energetic, prolific, catholic (small c) writer the guy was. No wonder my high school buddy, who was reading him at the time, couldn't shut up about him.

I knew a bit about Sinclair but had no idea how prolific and versatile he was. And his reputation was better than I thought, despite being controversial. Sinclair Lewis, on getting the Nobel Prize, said 3 other American writers deserved it as much: Dreiser, O'Neill and Sinclair. And his long novel Boston about the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, would have won the Pulitzer except for its Socialist bias, according to the chair of the prize committee.

Besides writing, Sinclair was into communes and movies, all this before running for governor An extraordinary man, personality, crusader, writer.