Upton Sinclair fetched me for dinner. I was surprised when I saw the author of “The Jungle,” whom I expected to be aggressive and strong-faced. Instead I found a gentle creature, rather vague, and rather shy and with a rather weak chin. We decided that our sort of background was not the Ambassador Hotel, and I asked him to take me anywhere else. We motored into the heart of the town, and went to a cafeteria. This was new to me. Never before had I been to a cafeteria. I had never even heard what they were like. I followed him and did what he did, and tried to look as if I knew what to do; he first took a metal tray from a column of trays, and passed along a row or buffet of hot dishes, selecting what he liked, and the serving woman behind the buffet placed a ration of his selection on his tray. Carrying our own trayfuls we retired to a little table. We talked until everyone else had left, until men on step ladders re-arranged the flowers on their columns, until finally the cafeteria closed and we were expelled. Most of that time we talked about “The Jungle.” I asked him a hundred questions. How did he _know_ about the lives of the foreign immigrants? How did he get into their souls? Had he imagined it, or did he know it? How had he learnt so much about the details of work at the packing houses? I learnt all I wanted to know. He had imagined nothing. The Russian family was a real family. The wedding feast was real--he was present. He had lived in Packingtown. Every story was a real story, a proven story. Everything was true ... and that was fifteen years ago, and conditions, he said, were much the same today. They had not much improved. He is a most sincere Socialist. Unrelenting, uncompromising, he is at war with all the powers that be. Don Quixote tilting at a windmill isn’t in it. Sinclair tilts at industrial kings in armor, at the octopus tendons of the newspaper kingdom--at all the mailed fists in the world in general and the United States in particular. He is in quest of truth and light. He wishes to undress the veiled spectres, and show us the naked truth beneath, the truth with all its maladies and sores, its hideousness, its terrible deformities, so ably hidden. This mild-faced man will stop at nothing. He has great courage and never fears destruction. He is unwavering in his determination. He goes crashing in where angels fear to tread.