Southern Belle.
Mary Sinclair’s Memoir Of Her Husband,
Inscribed By Upton Sinclair To Margaret Sanger
Sinclair, Mary Craig. Southern Belle. With a Foreword by Upton Sinclair. Phoenix Arizona: Sinclair Press (1962).
8vo.; illustrated; blue cloth; scarlet dust-jacket; vivid and sharp, with negligible rubbing to extremities.
Second, “Memorial” edition. The trade edition of this memoir by Sinclair’s second wife was published by Crown in 1957; Sinclair reissued it following her death under his own Sinclair Press. It was intended “for free distribution to public libraries.” “A copy will be sent,” he wrote, “as long as copies are available, postpaid, to libraries which ask for it.” A major presentation copy, inscribed, To Margaret Sanger, dear heroine. Upton Sinclair.
Mary Craig Kimbrough met Sinclair in New York during the 1910s, and the two were married in 1913. Her new husband had already established his reputation with The Jungle, the landmark 1906 muckraking novel of the Chicago meat-packing plants that Sinclair hoped would rally Americans to the Socialist cause. Its revolting descriptions of unsanitary food-handling led one outraged and disgusted reader—President Theodore Roosevelt—to champion the Pure Food and Drug Act, the least of the charges the author hoped to accomplish. “I aimed for America’s heart,” Sinclair famously said, “and hit its stomach instead.”
His marriage to Mary Kimbrough was an affair of both the heart and head. She and Sinclair were both native Southerners who followed their literary ambitions to New York and became embroiled in the radical politics of the early twentieth century. Once they were married, however, Sinclair seemed to regard Mary’s life as an adjunct to his own career. “She undertook,” Sinclair writes in this Foreword, “to be the helpmeet of a man who had set out to help in the ending of poverty and war in the world.” She would stand alongside him at pickets and rallies; “she helped him to write and publish three million books and pamphlets, flowing into every country in the world…In short, this Southern belle gave up the moonlight and magnolias, the balls and beauxs, the luxury and the peace of mind for a new sort of adventure in a world where there was poverty, danger and distress of mind.” Sinclair would marry a third time, and outlive that wife as well, passing away at age 90 in 1968.
Sinclair’s connection with Margaret Sanger dated from those electric, bohemian days in early twentieth century New York, where both lectured at the Ferrer center, and protested together outside the offices of John D. Rockefeller at 26 Broadway. By the time this book was published, they were neighbors and fellow retirees in Arizona, Sinclair living in Buckeye and Sanger in Tucson. This is the second Sinclair inscription to Sanger we have encountered: in 1942 he also gave her a copy of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Dragon’s Teeth.
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