Allan Gordon Sinclair, OC, FRGS (June 3, 1900 – May 17, 1984) was a Canadian journalist, writer, and commentator.

[1] After being fired from Eaton's, he took a junior bookkeeping job with Gutta Percha and Rubber Manufacturing Company, starting in April 1920.

[3] His breakthrough was a series of articles written after living among a group of homeless people, whom Sinclair called "Toronto's hobo club"[4] From that point, he rose to become one of the paper's star reporters, spending most of the next decade travelling the world, filing reports from exotic locations.

A public farewell was held on January 13, 1933, filling Massey Hall, with the Star estimating that an additional 6,500 people were turned away.

Sinclair ended up writing the story as well as reading it on the air, and continued to contribute brief reports to the station.

He returned to the Star in 1949, this time as a freelancer, for one final international tour, which included his coverage of the end of the Berlin Blockade.

While Sinclair was often controversial, he caused an uproar in 1969 when he asked Canadian Olympic swimmer Elaine Tanner if menstruation interfered with her training.

Sinclair was a vocal opponent of water fluoridation (calling it "rat poison" in 1958), the singing of "God Save the Queen", medicare and taxes.

[11] Although he was raised as a Methodist and taught Bible class as a youth, Sinclair became a forceful critic of religion and the church.

[11] Sinclair had invested his earnings in the Depression-era stock market and was independently wealthy by the end of the Second World War.

With the strong response generated by the editorial, a recording of Sinclair's commentary was sold as a single with all profits going to the American Red Cross.

A transcript of the commentary was also recorded by Byron MacGregor, news director of Windsor, Ontario, radio station CKLW (AM), and it became an even bigger hit in the U.S., climbing to No.

In May 1974, Sinclair told The Globe and Mail that he was "sick of hearing" the recording and embarrassed by some of the inaccuracies it contained,[17] but that he would still write the same editorial over again.

"The Americans" was widely revived on the Internet, radio and newspapers in 2001, following the September 11, 2001, attacks, and again in 2005 in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Some revivals of the message incorrectly state that it was newly written as a direct response to recent crises; in this question of its authorship alone, the address has become a part of urban legend.