King Coal

King Coal

The Project Gutenberg EBook of King Coal, by Upton Sinclair #20 in
our series by Upton Sinclair
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Title: King Coal A Novel
Author: Upton Sinclair
Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7522] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 13,

2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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COAL ***

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KING COAL
A NOVEL BY
UPTON SINCLAIR

TO
MARY CRAIG KIMBROUGH
To whose persistence in the perilous task of tearing her husband's
manuscript to pieces, the reader is indebted for the absence of most of
the faults from this book.

CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
THE DOMAIN OF KING COAL

BOOK TWO
THE SERFS OF KING COAL
BOOK THREE
THE HENCHMEN OF KING COAL
BOOK FOUR
THE WILL OF KING COAL

INTRODUCTION
Upton Sinclair is one of the not too many writers who have consecrated
their lives to the agitation for social justice, and who have also enrolled
their art in the service of a set purpose. A great and non-temporizing
enthusiast, he never flinched from making sacrifices. Now and then he
attained great material successes as a writer, but invariably he invested
and lost his earnings in enterprises by which he had hoped to ward off
injustice and to further human happiness. Though disappointed time
after time, he never lost faith nor courage to start again.
As a convinced socialist and eager advocate of unpopular doctrines, as
an exposer of social conditions that would otherwise be screened away
from the public eye, the most influential journals of his country were as
a rule arraigned against him. Though always a poor man, though never
willing to grant to publishers the concessions essential for many
editions and general popularity, he was maliciously represented to be a
carpet knight of radicalism and a socialist millionaire. He has several
times been obliged to change his publisher, which goes to prove that he
is no seeker of material gain.
Upton Sinclair is one of the writers of the present time most deserving
of a sympathetic interest. He shows his patriotism as an American, not
by joining in hymns to the very conditional kind of liberty peculiar to
the United States, but by agitating for infusing it with the elixir of real

liberty, the liberty of humanity. He does not limit himself to a
dispassionate and entertaining description of things as they are. But in
his appeals to the honour and good-fellowship of his compatriots, he
opens their eyes to the appalling conditions under which wage-earning
slaves are living by the hundreds of thousands. His object is to better
these unnatural conditions, to obtain for the very poorest a glimpse of
light and happiness, to make even them realise the sensation of cosy
well-being and the comfort of knowing that justice is to be found also
for them.
This time Upton Sinclair has absorbed himself in the study of the
miner's life in the lonesome pits of the Rocky Mountains, and his
sensitive and enthusiastic mind has brought to the world an American
parallel to GERMINAL, Emile Zola's technical masterpiece.
The conditions described in the two books are, however, essentially
different. While Zola's working-men are all natives of France, one
meets in Sinclair's book a motley variety of European emigrants,
speaking a Babel of languages and therefore debarred from forming
some sort of association to protect themselves against being exploited
by the anonymous limited Company. Notwithstanding this natural bar
against united action on the part of the wage-earning slaves, the
Company feels far from at ease and jealously guards its interests
against any attempt of organising the men.
A young American of the upper class, with great sympathy for the
downtrodden and an honest desire to get a first-hand knowledge of their
conditions in order to help them, decides