CARSON >> A Long Beach archivist who spent decades gathering the works of Upton Sinclair — the left-wing journalist, novelist and would-be governor who spent a portion of his life in Long Beach — has donated his collection of books, pamphlets and other materials to Cal State Dominguez Hills.

The collection, now part of the campus’ Archives and Special Collections, consists of more than 320 books, 100 pamphlets, 80 fliers and 14 boxes full of materials, according to Gregory Williams, director of the Dominguez Hills campus archives. The collection includes not only materials authored by Sinclair himself, but also by the man’s many detractors. The anti-Sinclair works include pamphlets opposing the author’s 1934 gubernatorial campaign as well as “Sinclair Dollars,” mock currency that parodied the candidate’s “End Poverty in California” slogan as “Endure Poverty in California.”

Retired Cal State Long Beach archivist and USC librarian John Ahouse, who donated the materials, spent decades assembling his collection. Ahouse began collecting Sinclair’s works after moving from New York to Los Angeles in 1978.

“Only then did I realize that this famous author was someone who lived in Long Beach, moved to California,” Ahouse said. “That was remarkable to me and that was the beginning of my real attention to this man. I felt attracted to his politics, but I was not aware that he was a resident of this part of the world.”

Collected at Dominguez Hills, Ahouse’s archive can be a source for faculty and members researching topics as diverse as American literature, California politics, labor disputes or the history of protest.

“We’re going to use the collection for our classes. I have a class coming up called ‘Documenting Resistance,’” said Vivian Price, a professor of labor studies.

Sinclair’s activities will be the first subject of Price’s class, she said.

Sinclair is almost certainly best known for his 1906 novel “The Jungle.” The book’s protagonist is a Chicago meatpacker named Jurgis Rudkus, who faces numerous hardships in his life as an immigrant working man, “The Jungle,” however, is most famous for its sickening descriptions of unsanitary conditions within food industry plants and is regarded as a factor in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which happened in the same year as the book’s publishing.

Sinclair said that his intent was to alert readers to the struggles being endured by workers like Jurgis, and has been quoted as saying, “I aimed for the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

Sinclair wrote dozens of other novels, including “Oil!,” which Sinclair wrote while living in Long Beach and inspired filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will be Blood;” “Boston: A Documentary Novel” on the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti and “Dragon’s Teeth,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

In addition to multiple editions of Sinclair’s novels, Ahouse’s collection also includes the first edition of “Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty Paper.” The February 1934 publication cost readers one nickel and its lead article, headlined “Women, children gassed by police” covered a report of a “feudal empire which has violently suppressed every semblance of civil rights” during a lettuce pickers’ strike in the Imperial Valley.

Sinclair’s activism also extended to his role in founding the first American Civil Liberties Union chapter in California following his arrest on charges of syndicalism for reading the Bill of Rights at Liberty Hill in San Pedro as an act of support for striking longshoreman in 1923.

Police had forbidden longshoremen from holding public meetings, according to the ACLU of Southern California, which now credits Sinclair with pushing the liberal group to take an “early and radical stand against worker exploitation.”

Ahouse’s collection also includes a ballot from the 1934 election in which Sinclair, a prominent socialist, obtained the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor. Sinclair’s End Poverty in California, or EPIC, platform, called for the state to take control of agricultural land and factories and create “colonies” for the unemployed to produce goods for their own use.

Sinclair outlined his plan in “I, Governor Upton Sinclair and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future.” After his defeat, Sinclair found himself authoring “I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked” rather than performing the duties of California’s chief executive.

A ballot from that 1934 election is part of Ahouse’s collection. The voter, whoever he or she was, voted not for Sinclair but rather Frank Merriam, the victorious Republican candidate who began his political career in this state as an Assemblyman representing Long Beach.

Opponents of Sinclair’s socialist policies wrote materials that also ended up in Ahouse’ collection. Williams described the documents as often being of “the basic he’s-a-Communist-in-favor-of-free-love” variety.

“The L.A. Times had a vendetta against him, and the movie industry, Louis B. Mayer, didn’t like him either,” Williams said.

Sinclair claimed about 38 percent of the 1934 vote to Merriam’s 49 percent. A third-party Progressive earned about 13 percent of the vote.

“He could have won that campaign,” Williams said.

In his years of collecting Sinclair materials at Southern California book shops, Ahouse said his interest in the author became so well known to store operators that they would often help him locate materials.

Ahouse’s collection now takes up several shelves worth of space at the Dominguez Hills campus library. Ahouse has employed his knowledge of Sinclair to write his own “Upton Sinclair: A Descriptive, Annotated Bibliography” for scholars, and the task of further organizing his work now falls to the school.

“We’re just starting to organize it. The books haven’t been catalogued yet,” Williams said.