"You don't have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it," wrote Upton Sinclair in 1962. He had spent his own life doing just that through his writing and political activism. Bom September 20,1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair began writing dime novels at the age of fifteen. By his death on November 25,1968, he had completed more than eighty books, twenty plays, and hundreds of articles dealing with virtually every social problem in the United States.