A Study Guide for Upton Sinclair's "The Second-Story Man"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Upton Sinclair's "The Second-Story Man", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Apr 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780028671246

Book preview

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The Second-Story Man

Upton Sinclair

1911

Introduction

The Second-Story Man, first staged in 1909, is a brief play with a rousing anticorporate message by Upton Sinclair, one of the most prolific and important American writers of the twentieth century. Today, Sinclair is revered for the political and populist significance of his writings, especially his 1906 novel The Jungle, which realistically exposed the appalling conditions faced by impoverished workers in meatpacking factories in Chicago. His literary reputation has not been as flourishing, largely because in contrast with the storytelling innovations of the modernists who were writing in the same era, he was too straightforward. Justifiably or not, the political messages with which his works are infused have been seen to compromise their status as art.

The Second-Story Man plays out with three characters over a single scene, as a burglar breaks into a house hoping to steal something worthwhile, only to have a most extraordinary conversation with the housewife who discovers him—and a most extraordinary revelation to her husband, who soon joins them. Jim, the burglar, has suffered greatly at the hands of corporate America, and this episode just may bring him some degree of resolution. The play was published with three others in Sinclair's 1911 volume Plays of Protest (republished in 2004). It is now out of copyright and available online.

Author Biography

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland. On his father's side, the family was a proud line of naval officers and aristocrats who sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, and thus found themselves bereft of status after its defeat. Sinclair's father engaged in businesses such as whiskey distribution and haberdashery supply, but his primary occupation was alcoholism, and the family's corresponding poverty came to mean frequent moves upon being evicted for failure to pay rent. Through this instability, the young Sinclair grew exceedingly attached to his mother, who took refuge in his care, and fell under the moral influence of her puritanical Methodism. As he did not attend school until he was almost eleven—a couple of years after the family moved to New York City—Sinclair socialized rarely and satisfied much of his desire for engagement through books.

In New York, Sinclair came into his own as an outgoing youth on the streets, but various new urban influences kept his spirits in check—the