As Mary puts it, "I was to Sylvia a new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman." While coming from different backgrounds and classes, both women share the experience of marrying the wrong man and Sylvia must deal with the consequences of her husband's pre-marital escapades. "The importance of the theme cannot be doubted and no one hitherto ignorant of the ravages of the evil and therefore, by implication, in need of being convinced can refuse general agreement with Mr. Sinclair upon the question as he argues it. The character that matters most is very much alive and most entertaining." -- The Times "Very severe and courageous. It would, indeed, be difficult to deny or extenuate the appalling truth of Mr. Sinclair's indictment." -- The Nation "There is not a man nor a grown woman who would not be better for reading Sylvia's Marriage." -- The Globe "Those who found Sylvia charming on her first appearance will find her as beautiful and fascinating as ever." -- The Pall Mall "A novel that frankly is devoted to the illustration of the dangers that society runs through the marriage of unsound men with unsuspecting women. The time has gone by when any objection was likely to be taken to a perfectly clean discussion of a nasty subject." -- T.P.'s Weekly Upton Sinclair was a prolific novelist, producing over 90 books in many genres. His book The Jungle, depicting conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry, was a national sensation and led to the eventual creation of the Food and Drug Administration. Sinclair was an ardent Socialist and ran for Congress on a socialist platform. His novel Dragion's Teeth, about the rise of the Nazi Party, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Author Biography

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (1878 - 1968) was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair's work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckraking novel The Jungle, which exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking expose of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the "free press" in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence." He is also well remembered for the line: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." He used this line in speeches and the book about his campaign for governor as a way to explain why the editors and publishers of the major newspapers in California would not treat seriously his proposals for old age pensions and other progressive reforms. Upton Sinclair was considered a force of nature -- being not only prolific in his novel-writing but a political force of decided influence. Unknown to many of his admirers, Sinclair also wrote adventure fiction, under the name Ensign Clark Fitch, U.S.N.