Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/81

 peer wonderingly, and come nearer and nearer to gaze at the startling spectacle. And precisely so it was with me; after "The Jungle" came out, and even after it was known that I was writing "The Metropolis," I used to see the sharp ears and soft brown eyes of timid and curious society antelopes peering at me through the curtained windows of Fifth Avenue mansions and Long Island country-places. All I had to do was to go on kicking my heels in the air, and they would come out of their hiding-places and draw nearer and nearer—until at last I might leap to my feet and seize my rifle and shoot them.

I can say truly that I did not break any game-laws in "The Metropolis." The ladies whom I drew from real life—for example, "Mrs. Vivie Patton" and "Mrs. Billy Alden"—were ladies who let me understand that they were "game"; they lived to be conspicuous, and they would not be distressed to have it rumored that they figured in my novel.

Some extracts from "The Metropolis" were published serially by the "American Magazine." The editors of the magazine opened negotiations with the "New York Times," offering to give them the exclusive story of this sensational serial. Van Anda, managing editor of the "Times," is a newspaper man, and made preparations for another big scoop, as in the case of the "condemned meat industry." But this time, alas, he reckoned without his owner! Mr. Adolph Ochs happened in at one o'clock in the morning, and discovered a three or four column story about "The Metropolis" on the front page of the "Times." It was not so bad for Upton Sinclair to attack a great industry of Chicago, but when it came to the sacred divinities of New York, that was another matter. The story was "killed"; and incidentally, Upton Sinclair was forbidden ever again to be featured by the "New York Times." The law laid down that night has been enforced for twelve years!

The editors of the "American Magazine" had expected to create a sensation, but they were not prepared for the storm of abuse which fell upon "The Metropolis," and upon them for publishing it. I was surprised myself by the way in which those who posed as men of letters dropped their literary camouflage, their pretenses of academic aloofness, and flung themselves into the class-struggle. It is a fact with which every union workingman is familiar, that his most