Literary Discussions

In my life I have frequently confused the two authors Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis who, ironically, spent one summer in the same experimental commune. It was Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle which called the nation's attention to abuses in the meat packing industry. We had to read The Jungle in Junior High School. I was too stupid to understand what was meant by "They use everything from the pig but the squeal."  What it meant was that the pigs were forced to walk up ramps until they reached the top of a tall tower where they were slaughtered, hung on meat hooks, and the WEIGHT of the pigs drove all the machinery of the slaugher house, so everything but the OINK was used. The awakening which Sinclair's  novel caused led to the formation of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Teddy Roosevelt met with Upton Sinclair to congratulate him but scolded him for being a tad too socialist. Sinclair Lewis was the first American to win a Nobel prize for literature http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1930/lewis-lecture.html  Sinclair Lewis was possibly the first to tackle the civil rights issue in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsblood_Royal years before it came to a head in the early 1960s.