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Writers in Princeton: Eight Houses, One Mystery

story by Stuart Mitchner

photographs by Tom Grimes

Of the writers’ houses shown here, most of them located reasonably close to Nassau Street, the most interesting proved to be, not surprisingly, the one that couldn’t be found. Almost couldn’t be found, rather, for the humble abode pictured above is the closest we’ll ever get to seeing the tarpaper-roofed shack in which Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, was written.

For this tangled tale, we could have used both Sam Spade and Nick Charles (whose creator, Dashiell Hammett, lived on Cleveland Lane in the late 1930s) since we're talking about a double mystery, a house that actually occupied two different spots a mile and a half apart. Since the heart of mystery happened to lie in his neighborhood, I consulted Princeton’s Pulitzer-prize winning author John McPhee, who told me that various people residing between the western reach of Ridgeview Road and an area close to the intersection of Province Line and Drake’s Corner roads (“literally in this neck of the former woods”) have thought that Upton Sinclair lived on or very close to their property. “If I were to name names, I could start with my own,” said McPhee. “Sinclair seems to have had more residential outlets than a groundhog.”

One thing for sure, this groundhog’s first residential outlet in Princeton was the platform tent he pitched behind a house “on the far side of a ridge three miles north of town” when he came here in May 1903 to write a novel about the Civil War while making use of the University library’s large Civil War collection. The 25-year-old writer, his wife, Meta, and infant son, David, lived in the tent until the onset of winter required the building of a “sixteen by eighteen foot cabin” with a tarpaper roof.

When Sinclair returned to Princeton after seven weeks in Chicago gathering the material that made The Jungle a nationwide sensation, he had the little cabin loaded onto a farmer’s wagon and transported to “an exposed ridge” adjacent to a farmhouse on Province Line Road he had bought for $2,600. There, in the same poorly insulated “shack,” as he refers to it in later years, he wrote “with tears and anguish” the book that made him rich and famous.

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