King Coal: A Novel

Upton Sinclair

Dec 2015 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A child of privilege plunges into a world of oppression, violence, and danger in this gripping indictment of the coal-mining industry from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Jungle

College leaves young Hal Warner feeling incomplete, with no sense of the “real” world outside its ivy-covered walls. So he leaves his life of privilege behind and signs on to work in a coal mine owned and operated by the General Fuel Company. But Hal finds out that there is nothing romantic about a miner’s life when he is forced to work long hours under backbreaking conditions and treated as more expendable than his company-owned equipment.
 
Hal befriends Mary Burke, a fiery miner’s daughter and a passionate advocate for workers’ rights. He gets caught up in the struggle to unionize, which brings him to the attention of his bosses and their powerful political allies. As Hal soon discovers, the powers-that-be will do anything to keep the unions out of Colorado’s mines, even if it means getting blood on their hands.
 
This ebook has been authorized by the estate of Upton Sinclair.

About the author

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state’s ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism; and the eleven novels in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lanny Budd series.