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Book Review of Upton Sinclair, Jr’s, The Jungle

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Introduction to The Jungle

The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair is an American novel that was published in 1906. It became a masterpiece of those times when the American landscape was witnessing a sea of changes in its economic and social structure on account of the inundation of immigrants from different parts of the world. The introduction of the assembly-line industrial setup attracted immigrants around the globe, leading to rugged and harsh working conditions. The novel was set in the United States in the suburbs of Chicago where the meatpacking industry boomed at that time. The story presents Jurgis, a Lithuanian immigrant, who arrives in the United States to materialize his American Dream.

Summary of The Jungle

The novel presents the story of Jurgis Rudkus who arrives in America from Lithuania with his new bride Ona Lukoszaite and his extended family for a better future and freedom. They fall into enormous debt because of the lavish wedding. Now ,  struggling to find some work in the Chicago suburbs. Not knowing English and living in the stockyards in the suburb of Chicago rather become their drawbacks in that they are unable to find respectable work except laboring in the meatpacking industry. While working in the slaughterhouse of Mr. Brown, Jurgis thinks that his dream of working with freedom in the United States has rather crashed on the ground, for his better half, too, is struggling with him to make both ends meet. Soon she becomes a victim of con men, while both waste their money in their efforts to purchase a house. It becomes inevitable for everyone in the family to work since the house they have leased comes with additional expenses which they have to pay everything month or face eviction.

Physical strength and morality soon leave them, making catastrophes hitting them through accidents and other problems. The first such catastrophe is the father of Jurgis who becomes the victim of the dirty conditions in the meatpacking industry and dies due to the lung infection. Kristoforas, son of Elzbieta and stepbrother of Ona is another victim who dies of food poisoning, while Jonas, brother of Elzbieta disappears from the scene leaving the family in a vulnerable condition. Soon Jurgis also finds himself sacked, as he was left jobless because of the injury he faced at the workplace. Instead of compensating, the company lays him off and doesn’t rehire him.

Ona has become a victim of workplace harassment at the hands of her boss Connor who blackmails to fire her if she doesn’t sleep with him. Jurgis becomes aware of his wife’s behavior and when he comes to know this betrayal in the family, he injures Connor, the exploiting boss of Ona, but faces arrest and is thrown behind the bars for this criminal act. However, when he wins his release, he finds his family on the roads after their eviction from the house. Soon the family finds itself in a boarding house with Ona having another child on the way which takes the life of both, the mother as well as the child. Jurgis feels disenchanted on account of his financial inability to save his wife and child and takes to drinking when visiting rural America .

Seeing the farmers using the workers to their ends, he comes back to Chicago and joins the scammers to pass his days. He was sent to jail again when he involves in a fight with a bartender who tricks him by taking his hundred dollars which he has received from the rich son of the packing industry. In the prison, he befriends Jack Duane and falls into the underworld crime. He becomes a vote fixer for Mike Scully and runs in Connor again. He gets into a fight with him and learns that Scully and Connor are friends. Now, he uses all his money to escape prison.

However, he finds Marija, the cousin of his better half, who is also passing her time working as a prostitute to feed the rest of the family. He is shocked to know that she, too, is addicted to heroin and even more shocked to know that the oldest child, Stanislovas, has died when locked at work because the rats eat him when he was passed out from alcohol. It happens that he finds a socialist demagogue who gives him hope and energy to support his family again by working at a hotel run by the Socialist party. The book ends on rather a happy note about the political victories of the socialists and Jurgis dedicates his life to the cause of socialism.

Major Themes in The Jungle

• Capitalism: The novel sheds light on the ravages of capitalism at the beginning of the 20 th century in the United States when big meatpacking industries were growing in the suburbs of Chicago, absorbing and swallowing up the immigrants’ disregard of the wages and living conditions provided to the manual laborers. The conditions in which Jurgis finds himself, including his family members, show that capitalism’s priority is building their companies and only think about the profits to maintain their big industries and their production. They don’t care about the people who help build their organization. The elite class gets the lion’s share, leaving only a few morsels for the people like Jurgis. Also, the propagation of socialism could only be executed through the denigration of capitalism, the major intention of the writer.
• Flawed American Dream: The author meaningfully denigrates the idea of the American dream through the capitalistic brutalities, which have ravaged the lives of the immigrants like that of Ona and Jurgis. The extended family takes to the United States and reaches Chicago with the idea that they would have a lot of work to do to improve their standard of life. However, what they see and come face to face is to work very hard and get a meager income in return that is barely enough to keep their bodies continue breathing and working. Jurgis’s on and off work problems, Marija’s hard-working and the prostitution of the female members of the family that Jurgis sees, in the end, is enough to show this wrong idea of the American dream that Sinclair has meekly condemned through this novel.
• Problems of Migration: Although migration brings betterment in life, the search for the green pasture of Jurigs ends in disenchantment, for he thought of having a better lifestyle, but finds himself in a dilemma where he cannot help out his wife against the bullying boss and other women against the threatening hunger. This problem of migration becomes even more acute when it takes the root of anti-acculturation as the Lithuanian individuals take too much time to integrate with the locals due to having no time to understand the culture. The non-conformity of Tera to the funeral rites and the death of the father of Jurgis are some instances where this cultural problem seems acute.
• Politics: The politics of capitalism takes its toll on the class, the reason that the working class always sees socialism as the solution. Phill Connor and Mike Scully, together, confirm it that they sit at the top in Packingtown and exploit workers for their benefit as well as domination in the social structure. Their shamefacedness in the domination of the institutional hierarchy also continues in that they take advantage of every person they employ and even do not hesitate in crushing or abusing the rebels as it happens in the case of Ona and Jurgis, and Jurgis sees that even law takes their side and do not offer justice to the exploited.
• Familial Ties: The novel outlines familial relationships and the importance of blending together in a new country as immigrants. Although Jurgis fails to settle and support the members of his extended family, yet he decides to assist Marija when he sees that she is struggling to make both ends meet. Despite the fact that his father has breathed his last as well as his wife and the newborn, who could not be hospitalized due to his unstable financial condition, die. Yet, family ties support all of the Lithuanians during these trying times in Chicago.
• Gender Abuse: The novel shows gender abuse in the shape of Ona who undergoes the worst treatment, including offering sexual favors to Connor to win a job. Marija, too, faces the same thing and finally falls into prostitution when she sees things not coming easily to her.
• Poverty : The novel shows that poverty is not a prevalent condition. It is evident that is brought on or forced due to the exploitation within the hierarchical system led by capitalism, Jurgis and other family members face poverty because they could not cope with the industrial exploitation. They reach the United States on the expectations that the economic system there would be based on justice and fair play , little knowing that the same elite class is ruling there and that human nature of exploiting the vulnerable strata stay the same disregard of the place and space. He sees his wife dying in his hands during childbirth, other relatives dying of harsh conditions, and Marija suffering and exploited all because of poverty.
• Slaved Labor: The appalling conditions prevalent in the meatpacking industry and ranches and the exploitation of all the poor disregard of gender show that slaved labor is a condition that could emerge anywhere in the world. It was happening in the American city of Chicago that the immigrants like Jurgis and his extended family members are facing exploitation to work at lower wages and yet they cannot do anything.
• Socialism: Socialism emerges in the novel when Jurgis finds nothing else to support him and comes to a point where an orator is telling them the benefits of socialism. Finally, he comes to learn that it is a mass welfare system where he would be earning as much as he would be working.
• Journalistic Trend: The author tries to point out appalling working conditions at the beginning of the 20th century. He also provideS a journalistic view, through the fictional stories by unearthing injustice and evil-mindedness of human beings which pervades even the best-organized societies. The story of Jurgis is just a network to uncover the barbarism and cruelty of the upper class.  

Major Characters in The Jungle

• Jurgis Rudkus: A Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus is the protagonist of the novel. He is also the author’s mouthpiece as he critiques American capitalism and the American dream. Upton Sinclair outlines his main argument of anti-capitalism through his and his family’s plight in the meatpacking industry of Chicago. Despite his initial optimism and dedication to his family, Jurgis soon comes to know the machinations of the capitalistic class when he finds Ona being exploited by her boss, Connor, and himself in jail for assaulting him on this injustice. Finally, he comes to the point that his penury and inability to save his daughter and wife could not materialize his American dream for which the whole family has moved to this new land. After Antanas’s sad demise, he leaves the family but finally comes to know that even his alcoholism would not resolve his issues except his leanings toward the socialistic ideology.
• Ona Lukoszaite Rudkus: Although Ona is an educated and talented lady, her talent in the replenishing familial pursuit of the American dream comes to nothing when she becomes the victim and is severely exploited by her boss, Connor, during their stay in Packingtown. Despite her weaker conditions on account of her pregnancy, she takes the initiative of working hard to help out Jurgis whom she seems always engaged in some labor to pull the family out of penury. Her worsening situation does not discourage her, nor it dissuades her from doing her part of the job. She even does not complain and inform her husband about her exploitation and dies after she gives birth to a daughter. She proves that despite human efforts, natural and social forces prove an anathema in the way of realizing their dreams .
• Marija Berczynskas: Marija is another female member of the family who becomes a victim of exploitation and even violence. She still displays the courage to get revenge from the perpetrators. She also demonstrates this courage when she thrashes her employer before their migrating to Chicago. Her idea of settling in the United States and realizing her American dream, however, loses its steam when she comes to Chicago during the depression and loses her chance of marrying Tamoszius Kuszlekia, her co-worker. Her injury during her beef trimming jobs leads to her disability after the amputation of her hand, forcing her into prostitution from which she refuses to pull herself out despite the best efforts of Jurgis.
• Teta Elzbieta: A thoroughgoing pragmatist, Teta, Ona’s mother, is the matriarch of the family who knows the reality of their American dream deep down in her heart. That is why when Jurgis decides to join the socialist movement, she does not discourage him from this despite knowing that it would also come to nothing like their previous efforts. Despite living in the United States, her heart stays in Lithuania and she insists on the traditional Lithuanian marriage ceremony of Jurgis and Ona and tries to bet money in her stubbornness to stick to the traditions.
• Phil Connor: In his supervisory role of the loading crew in the factory in Chicago, Phil Connor represents the white color workers, a symbol of capitalism. Invested with great powers as the head of the department, he has formed relationships with political figures of the area to hide his abusive treatment toward the workers, the reason that he is involved in the sexual exploitation of Ona and yet gets arrested Jurgis when the latter assaults him for this crime. His way of making people silent with threats comes to light in the case of Ona and Marija. He even exploits the judiciary to come clean of his criminal behavior. His character is the representation of the rising elite class that works for the prevalence of the status quo for its interests.
• Mike Scully: A symbol of the democratic figure backing capitalism, Skully is an influential figure in Chicago’s Packingtown area, who keeps things working behind the scenes and does not let the commoners know her real personality. That is why Jurgis, despite working for him, does not know anything about his relationship with Connor and even is oblivious to his hands in the death of his family members.
• Antanas Rudkus: As the patriarch of the Rudkus, Antanas shows his responsible character when he tries his best to make his family succeed in the capitalistic environment of Packingtown. However, he comes to know the worth of the old people shortly after he lands in Chicago and dies during work in the factory.
• Nicholas Schliemann: Nicholas is a significant character in the novel. He seems to be a remedy or has an elixir of the ills the factory workers are suffering from. He represents a new breed of the proponents of socialism in the United States, working hard on giving voice to the poor.
• Antanas Rudkus: Antanas is the only son of the couple. The expectations the family has attached with him dash to the ground when he dies after he slips.

Writing Style of The Jungle

Upton Sinclair adopted a unique writing style in The Jungle as he narrates the story by weaving a fictional character and yet reporting the facts. The author highlights the conditions in the meatpacking industry, and how the workers remained poor, working in unhygienic conditions, and under appalling labor conditions. As far as the sentences and style are concerned, they are neither long nor short; just having enough length that shows the characters and the situations in which they are trapped. The diction is appropriate to the time and the characters. Sometimes, the readers notice wordy but that is the demand of the text such as in the case of speeches delivered by Jurgis.

Analysis of the Literary Devices in The Jungle

• Action: The main action of the novel comprises the immigration of Jurgis Rudkus and his family to Chicago, their struggle to survive the appalling conditions, and Jurgis’ final decision to join the socialist movement. The rising action occurs when Ona finds herself sexually molested by Connor, while the falling action occurs when Jurgis goes back to his old job but does not find it waiting for him.
• Anaphora : The novel shows examples of anaphora . For example, i. She has not taken a drop, but every one else there is literally burning alcohol, as the lamps are burning oil; some of the men who are sound asleep in their chairs or on the floor are reeking of it so that you cannot go near them. (Chapter-I) ii. For he is an inspired man. Every inch of him is inspired—you might almost say inspired separately. (Chapter-1) iii. His whole soul was dancing with joy—he was at work at last! He was at work and earning money! (Chapter-4) The examples show the repetitious use of “burning”, “inspired” and “he was at work.”
• Allusion : The novel shows good use of different allusions as given in the below examples, i. For fear that the significance of all this should be lost, there was a label, in Polish, Lithuanian, and German—” Dom. Namai. Heim. ” “Why pay rent?” the linguistic circular went on to demand. “Why not own your own home? (Chapter-4) ii. Jurgis had had enough to eat in the jail, and the work had been the least trying of any that he had done since he came to Chicago; but even so, he had not grown strong—the fear and grief that had preyed upon his mind had worn him thin. (Chapter-18) iii. “Wait,” he said. “He has something to say to me.” And then he looked into Jurgis’s face. “You want to know more about Socialism?” he asked. (Chapter-29) The first two examples show references to places, while the last one shows alluding to the political theory of socialism.
• Antagonist : Phil Connor is the antagonist of the novel as he appears to have tried his best to obstruct all avenues for Jurgis and his relatives not to work freely.
• Conflict : The novel shows both external and internal conflicts. The external conflict is going on between Jurgis, Connor, and other capitalists about wages and profits. The internal conflict is going on in the mind of Jurgis that he is unable to support the females of his family and even the family itself.
• Characters: The novel shows both static as well as dynamic characters. Jurgis is a dynamic character as she shows a considerable transformation in his behavior and conduct by the end of the novel. However, all other characters are static as they do not show or witness any transformation Ona, Marija, Elzbieta, and Connor.
• Climax : The climax in the novel occurs when Jurgis comes to know about the rape of Ona when exploited by Connor, her boss. In rage, he attacks him and is arrested for the crime.
• Foreshadowing : The novel shows many instances of foreshadows as given in the below examples, i. It was four o’clock when the ceremony was over and the carriages began to arrive. There had been a crowd following all the way, owing to the exuberance of Marija Berczynskas. (Chapter-1) ii. Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterward—stories to make your flesh creep , but Jurgis would only laugh. (Chapter-2) The mention of happiness and work shows the something sinister is going to happen and make the readers sense it.
• Hyperbole : The novel shows various examples of hyperboles given below, i. There had been a heavy snow , and now a thaw had set in; fine sleety rain was falling, driven by a wind that pierced Jurgis to the bone. (Chapter-18) ii. Jurgis, who by this time would cheerfully have cracked the heads of all the gamblers in Chicago, inquired what would be coming to him. (Chapter-25) Both of these examples exaggerate things such as snow and the cracking of heads.
• Imagery : Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. For example, i. She stood in the doorway, shepherded by Cousin Marija, breathless from pushing through the crowd, and in her happiness painful to look upon. There was a light of wonder in her eyes and her lids trembled, and her otherwise wan little face was flushed. She wore a muslin dress, conspicuously white, and a stiff little veil coming to her shoulders. (Chapter-I) ii. On the uneven floor it was a task for a man to start one of these trucks, unless he was a giant; and when it was once started he naturally tried his best to keep it going. There was always the boss prowling about, and if there was a second’s delay he would fall to cursing; Lithuanians and Slovaks and such, who could not understand what was said to them, the bosses were wont to kick about the place like so many dogs. (Chapter-5) These two examples show images of color, sound, and feelings.
• Metaphor : The Jungle shows excellent use of various metaphors as given in the below examples, i. Suddenly some of the steam begins to advance, and, peering through it, you discern Aunt Elizabeth, Ona’s stepmother—Teta Elzbieta, as they call her— bearing aloft a great platter of stewed duck. (Chapter-I) ii. So, after all, there was a crack in the fine structure of Jurgis’ faith in things as they are. The crack was wide while Dede Antanas was hunting a job—and it was yet wider when he finally got it. (Chapter-6) iii. All this while that he was seeking for work, there was a dark shadow hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere in the pathway of his life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approaching the place. (Chapter-14) These examples show that several things have been compared directly in the novel as the first shows the comparison of steam with a train or something like that, the second shows the difference as cracks and the third shows the job or work as a shadow.
• Mood : The novel shows various moods; it starts with a happy and jovial mood but suddenly turns to tragic when a child dies in the family and then vacillates between good, bad, and sometimes simmering.
• Motif : Most important motifs of the novel, The Jungle, are weathers, power , family, corruption, and traditions.
• Narrator : The novel is narrated in the third-person point of view , who is the author.
• Personification : The novel shows examples of personifications as given in the examples below, i. Suddenly some of the steam begins to advance, and, peering through it, you discern Aunt Elizabeth, Ona’s stepmother—Teta Elzbieta, as they call her— bearing aloft a great platter of stewed duck. (Chapter-I) ii. Sometimes, in desperate hours, he would find himself wishing that she might learn what it was, so that he need not be ashamed in her presence. (Chapter-14) These examples show as if the steam and hours have life and emotions of their own.
• Protagonist : Jurgis is the protagonist of the novel. The novel starts with his entry on the scene and moves forward as he works and fails and then joins the socialists.
• Rhetorical Questions : The novel shows good use of rhetorical questions at several places as given in the below examples, i. There was poor old ponas Jokubas, for instance—he had already given five dollars, and did not every one know that Jokubas Szedvilas had just mortgaged his delicatessen store for two hundred dollars to meet several months’ overdue rent? (Chapter-I) ii. So this grim old women went on with her tale of horrors . How much of it was exaggeration —who could tell? It was only too plausible . There was that about consumption, for instance. (Chapter-6) This example shows the use of rhetorical questions posed but different characters not to elicit answers but to stress upon the underlined idea.
• Setting : The setting of the novel is Packingtown, the suburb of Chicago.
• Simile : The novel shows good use of various similes as given in the below examples, i. The sweat starts out on his forehead, and he bends over like a cyclist on the last lap of a race. His body shakes and throbs like a runaway steam engine, and the ear cannot follow the flying showers of notes—there is a pale blue mist where you look to see his bowing arm. (Chapter-1) ii. It was the week before Christmas that the first storm came, and then the soul of Jurgis rose up within him like a sleeping lion. (Chapter-11) iii. The word rang through him like the sound of a bell, echoing in the far depths of him, making forgotten chords to vibrate, old shadowy fears to stir—fears of the dark, fears of the void, fears of annihilation. (Chapter-19) These are similes as the use of the word “like” shows the comparison between different things.

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• The Jungle Characters
• The Jungle Themes
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'The Jungle' Questions for Study and Discussion

Upton Sinclair's Banned Book

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The Jungle is one of the greatest (and most controversial) works by  Upton Sinclair. . Dedicated to "the Workingmen of America," the novel detailed the unhealthy conditions of the meatpacking industry and eventually led President Theodore Roosevelt to pursue new federal legislations. 

Here are a few questions for study and discussion to think about before and after reading this work.

• What is important about the title: The Jungle ?
• What are the conflicts in The Jungle ? What types of conflict (physical, moral, intellectual, or emotional) did you notice in this novel?
• How does Upton Sinclair reveal character in The Jungle ?
• What are some themes in the novel? How do they relate to the plot and characters?
• What are some symbols in The Jungle ? How do they relate to the plot and characters?
• Is Jurgis Rudkus consistent in her actions? Is he a fully developed character? How? Why?
• Do you find the characters likable? Are the characters persons you would want to meet?
• Does the novel end the way you expected? How? Why?
• What is the central/primary purpose of the novel? Is the purpose important or meaningful?
• Why is the novel usually considered a work of protest literature?
• How essential is the setting to the story? Could the story have taken place anywhere else?
• What is the role of women in the text? How are mothers represented? What about single/independent women?
• Would you recommend this novel to a friend?
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• 'The Yellow Wallpaper' Questions for Study
• 'The Story of an Hour' Questions for Study and Discussion
• 'The Great Gatsby' Study Questions
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Book Review: The Jungle

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

I recently revisited Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle —the original edition published by a socialist newspaper in 1905, not the shorter version published by Doubleday, Page (after Macmillan ultimately rejected it) in 1906.

It wasn’t surprising to see what had been left out of the original book (though the censored version was horrific enough) and I’m glad I had the chance to read the book in its entirety, as it was meant to be read. Most interesting to me, reading it for the first time as a vegan, is how much of an animal-rights book it is.

One odd thing that animal-rights activists are often asked is why they don’t help humans before animals. Animal Liberation author Peter Singer says it best: “There is nothing to stop those who devote their time and energy to human problems from joining the boycott of the products of agribusiness cruelty. It takes no more time to be a vegetarian than to eat animal flesh. In fact…those who claim to care about the well-being of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone.”

And in The Jungle , Sinclair likewise shows us links between animal rights and human rights. There are few industries more abusive to human workers than factory farms. The undercover footage we see of workers abusing animals is appalling, and of course there is never any justification for this sort of cruelty—but would this happen if these workers had decent conditions in which to work, if they were treated with any dignity at all themselves? It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to know that abuse only leads to more abuse. (This interview with an undercover investigator by Our Hen House  and Peter Orner’s wonderful book Underground America both reveal a lot about what the humans in this industry endure.)

And Sinclair’s The Jungle, too, portrays it well. Yet while things have certainly improved when it comes to food safety, reading The Jungle brings to mind some of the human and animal abuse that still goes on today.

This passage, for example, could have been written about a factory farm of the twenty-first century: “That day they had killed about four thousand cattle, and these cattle had come in freight trains, from far states, and some of them had got hurt. There were some with broken legs and some with gored sides; there were some that had died, from what cause no one could say; and they were all to be disposed of here in darkness and silence.”

Sinclair, while focused on the plight of the poverty-stricken immigrant workers, was not at all blind to the suffering of the animals. “Each one of these pigs was a separate creature,” he wrote. “Some were white pigs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some were young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway.”

It’s impossible not to be moved by this book, and even if you’ve read it before, it’s worth revisiting. As groundbreaking as it was back in the early twentieth century, The Jungle still feels groundbreaking today, for it tackles issues that are, sadly, all-too-relevant: the abuse of factory workers, and the abuse of animals at the hands not only of the workers but even more so of the corporations that run these factories. As Sinclair writes, “… murder it was that went on there upon the killing-floor, systematic, deliberate and hideous murder—and there was no other word for it, and nothing else to be said about it. They were slaughtering men out there, just as certainly as they were slaughtering cattle; they were grinding the bodies and souls of them, and turning them into dollars and cents.”

Midge Raymond is a co-founder of Ashland Creek Press. She is the author of the novel My Last Continent and the award-winning short story collection Forgetting English . Her suspense novel, Devils Island , co-authored with John Yunker, is forthcoming from Oceanview Publishing in 2024, and her novel Floreana is forthcoming from Little A in 2025.

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by Upton Sinclair

• The Jungle Summary

The Jungle is the story of Jurgis Rudkus and his family, Lithuanian immigrants who come to America to work in the meatpacking plants of Chicago. Their story is a story of hardship. They face enormous difficulties: harsh and dangerous working conditions, poverty and starvation, unjust businessmen who take their money, and corrupt politicians who create laws that allow all of this to happen. The story follows the hardships of Jurgis and his family and the transformation that Jurgis undergoes when he accepts the new political and economic revolution of socialism.

The novel begins at the wedding of Jurgis and Ona Rudkus. Marija Berczynskas , a strong and commanding woman, directs the wedding and Tamoszius Kuszleika provides music with his violin. Although Tamoszius's "notes are never true, and his fiddle buzzes on the low ones and squeaks and scratches on the high," he is the star of the wedding. Everyone in the slums of Packingtown is invited, and they are supposed to pay tribute to the family. Many do not, however, and this leaves Jurgis and Ona deeply in debt on the first day of their marriage.

Jurgis and Ona came from the countryside of Lithuania. Because Jurgis and Ona were not allowed to marry in Lithuania and because Ona's father dies, leaving them with little money, Jurgis decides to move his and Ona's family to America. Jonas, Jurgis's brother, tells them of a friend who made a fortune in Chicago and they decide to go there. Upon arriving in America, however, they discover that while the wages are higher, so are the prices. Several agents and thieves scam them when they arrive, and soon much of their money is gone.

In Chicago, they live in a polluted and corrupt slum. Part of their neighborhood, Packingtown, is built upon a garbage dump, and that entire part of the city reeks of garbage and is filled with flies. Jurgis and Ona still feel as though they have much potential in this new land, however. Jurgis goes to the meatpacking plant and immediately finds a job sweeping blood and innards from slaughtered cattle through a drain. The work is very hard and the conditions are very unsafe, but Jurgis is strong and stubborn and cannot understand any man who is not thankful for the opportunity to have work and to earn a living. Many of the workers are bitter about their working conditions, however.

The packinghouses are dirty and unsanitary places where every part of the animal is used to make a profit. Often, spoiled meat will be marked as good and sent out for sale. Many of the old or rotten pieces of animals are sold, and even the refuse from drainage is thrown into the pile of meat to be canned or made into sausage. In some of the factories, dead rats are added to the meat. The workers do not care and the factory bosses do everything they can to speed up the production of the meat. Often the factories will hire extra workers just to keep wages down. There are always more men looking for jobs than there are jobs to give, so most men only make a few cents per hour.

The family sees an advertisement for a house to buy, and they decide that it will be worth their money to buy instead of throwing away their money on rent every month. The house is advertised as new, though it does not look that way, and the real estate agent is a slick man and sells it to them for only a few hundred dollars down. The family balks at the contract, however, when it says that they will only be renting the house, but several lawyers tell them that this is standard and that after seven years of payments they will own the house. The family signs the agreement and moves into the house. They buy new furniture and all settle into their new lives. Marija and Jonas get jobs, and soon Ona and little Stanislovas, one of the family's children, work as well, but they always afford their payment. Soon, however, they find out that they are charged interest on the house and must buy insurance. They soon find that the real estate company sells the houses as new, but then kicks out the occupants when they cannot pay the rent and interest and then sells it to another naïve immigrant family.

The winters are very hard in Chicago, and often the snow is so deep that the family has a difficult time getting to work. Jurgis comes to understand the hardships of his job and of his fellow workers. They are worked to the bone, and the companies do everything they can to speed up the work and to pay lower wages. They use corrupt practices to sell rotting meat, and they can do all of this because they own the politicians who make the laws. Jurgis and Marija join the unions and soon become active members. Jurgis becomes a "crusader" for the unions and sets out to "spread the gospel of Brotherhood by force of arms." In the summer, Marija's factory is furloughed because there is not enough work to employ everyone, so the family begins to struggle even more with money.

Old Antanas dies from sickness that he contracts in one of the factories, and Ona and Teta Elzbieta go into the workforce in order to help the family meet its financial obligations. Their work is difficult, and when Ona becomes pregnant, she is forced to continue working and given only a week off to have her child. She returns to the workforce too quickly and is beset with pain and sickness for the rest of her life. One day, Jurgis finds that Ona does not come home from the factory. When he finds her and questions her, he soon learns that she is being forced into sexual relations by one of the factory bosses. This infuriates Jurgis, who goes to the factory where he beats the man. He is thrown in jail and cannot work. The family falls into an even greater economic depression.

When Jurgis leaves jail, he returns home to find that Ona is in childbirth several months before their second child is due to be born. Ona then dies in childbirth, and Jurgis falls into turmoil. He begins to drink heavily, and Elzbieta keeps his money from him so that the family might survive. Jurgis goes into the city where he soon finds work at a harvesting-machine plant. Philanthropists run the plant is run, and it gives the workers a decent living with fair working conditions. Jurgis soon loses that job, however, and this causes him a greater hatred for the economic systems that keep him and his family in poverty and deny him the ability to work for his keep.

Again without a job, Jurgis begs for work and food. He has a fortuitous turn when one of the children meets a "settlement-worker" who promises Jurgis a job in a steel mill fifteen miles from his home. Jurgis travels to work at this place but soon has an accident with the fiery steel, which takes the skin off his hand. He returns home and cares for his young son for several days. He returns to work when he is healed and comes home on Saturdays to visit his family. He comes home one day, however, to find that his young son Antanas has drowned in one of Packingtown's flooded streets.

Jurgis then leaves Packingtown, hopping on a train into the countryside. He becomes a tramp, traveling across the country, sleeping in fields and forests and taking meals from farmers when he can. He decides now that he will fight the world that has caused him such hardships and do as he pleases. He spends his money on prostitutes and drinking and becomes a migrant farm laborer. He feels freer than he ever has before. One night, however, he stays with a farmer and, upon seeing the farmer's wife bathe their young son, he is filled with grief over the death of his son.

Jurgis returns to Chicago and finds a job building rail tunnels beneath the streets of Chicago. While working at this job one evening, he is struck by a runaway train and badly breaks his arm. After being in the hospital for many days, he is released back onto the street. He has no money, however, and cannot work because of his injury. Jurgis begins to beg on the streets and becomes very hungry and very cold. During one bitter cold streak, Jurgis meets a drunken young man on the street. The young man invites him back to his house, and Jurgis learns that he has found the youngest son of Jones, one of the packing plant owners, who owns an extravagant house with many expensive things. Jurgis steals one hundred dollars from the boy but is then kicked out of the house. He tries to break the hundred-dollar bill, but gets in a fight after a barkeeper steals his money, and he once again goes to jail.

While in jail, Jurgis meets with Jack Duane , an old friend from his previous jail stint. Duange invites Jurgis into his life of petty thievery, and Jurgis soon becomes involved in all kinds of illegal scams and swindles. He falls in with the Chicago crime scene and soon makes a good deal of money. He then becomes involved in the corrupt Chicago political machine and takes part in a scam to help Mike Scully , the political power of Packingtown, elect a Republican to the city council and to help retain his power. Jurgis makes good money from this scam and gets a job at the packing plant earning more money.

When the great Beef Strike occurs, Jurgis stays at his job and becomes a scab. He earns even more money but begins to drink heavily, gamble, and take part in fights. The packers bring in poor black laborers from the South to break the strike, and Packingtown is soon embroiled in even more filth and debauchery than before. One evening, Jurgis is drunk and walking home when he runs into Connor, the man who raped his wife. He becomes so enraged that he begins to beat Connor again. He is arrested and, though he has political connections now, he cannot get out of jail because Connor was a friend of Scully's. A friend helps him post bail and, now without any money again, Jurgis skips town.

Once again a tramp, Jurgis begs and steals to find food to eat. After going to a political rally in order to stay warm one evening, Jurgis runs into an old friend from Lithuania, who gives him Marija's address. Jurgis finds Marija in a whorehouse, working as a prostitute. Marija tells Jurgis that this is the only way that she could find to provide for herself and the remaining members of the family. Even Stanislovas had been killed by rats after getting locked in a factory at night. Jurgis is suddenly arrested in a raid on the whorehouse. While spending the night in jail, Jurgis descends into the deepest despair of his soul and the voices of his past are extinguished.

After release from jail, Jurgis once again goes to a political rally in order to find a warm place to sit for a while. When he falls asleep in the rally, a young woman calls him "comrade" and tells him that he should pay attention and that maybe he would find something to like in the political speech. Jurgis suddenly becomes fascinated with the speaker, a fiery man, who details all of the economic, social, and political unjustness that keeps workers in poverty and in hardship. Jurgis comes up to the man afterwards and asks to know more. He goes home with a man named Ostrinski, who explains socialism.

Jurgis becomes a proud advocate for the Socialist Party. He goes to work for a man named Hinds, an ardent Socialist, as a hotel porter. He enters a "life of the mind" and learns as much as he can about this political and economic system. He is invited to a dinner at a prominent Socialist's house, where he hears a Socialist intellectual, a preacher of Christian Socialism, and a skeptical newspaper editor debate the merits of a new Socialist world order. After the dinner, Jurgis attends an election night celebration at the Socialist Party headquarters. The number of Socialist votes that come in are extraordinary. The Socialists have increased their voter turnout by over three hundred percent. A speaker rises to tell the crowd to avoid complacency and to fight for the Socialist Party cause and that soon "Chicago will be ours!"

The Jungle Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Jungle is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What loaded language does the author use throughout the passge

What passage are you referring to?

In Chapter One, a crisis occurs when the family cannot raise the money needed to pay for the wedding. This results in increased hardships and a darker mood for the family with Jurgis’s promise to “work harder.”

where does Jurgis begin his sentence? why does he remain alone?

Jurgis is sent to Bridewell Prison. He wants to get out in ten days so he tries to stay out of trouble.

Study Guide for The Jungle

The Jungle study guide contains a biography of Upton Sinclair, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Jungle
• Character List

Essays for The Jungle

The Jungle essays are academic essays for citation. These literature papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

• "The Jungle: Fiction, History, or Both?"
• Upton Sinclair's Indictment of Wage Slavery in The Jungle
• Preying on the Immigrant Experience: Sinclair's The Jungle
• The (Literal) Jungle: Symbolism and Meaning in Sinclair's Narrative
• Muckrakers: Differing Styles in Upton Sinclair and Eric Schlosser

Lesson Plan for The Jungle

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Jungle
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Jungle Bibliography

E-Text of The Jungle

The Jungle e-text contains the full text of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

• Chapters 1-5
• Chapters 6-10
• Chapters 11-15
• Chapters 16-20
• Chapters 21-25

Wikipedia Entries for The Jungle

• Introduction
• Plot summary
• Publication history

Upton Sinclair , Earl Lee  ( Foreword ) , Kathleen De Grave  ( Introduction )

335 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1906

About the author

Upton Sinclair

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Every day in New York they slaughter four million ducks five million pigs and two thousand doves for the pleasure of the dying, a million cows a million lambs and two million roosters, that leave the sky in splinters. —Federico García Lorca

The city, which was owned by an oligarchy of business men, being nominally ruled by the people, a huge army of graft was necessary for the purpose of effecting the transfer of power. Twice a year, in the spring and fall elections, millions of dollars were furnished by the business men and expended by this army; meetings were held and clever speakers were hired, bands played and rockets sizzled, tons of documents and reservoirs of drinks were distributed, and tens of thousands of votes were bought for cash. And this army of graft had, of course, to be maintained the year round. The leaders and organizers were maintained by the business men directly—aldermen and legislators by means of bribes, party officials out of the campaign funds, lobbyists and corporation lawyers in the form of salaries, contractors by means of jobs, labor union leaders by subsidies, and newspaper proprietors and editors by advertisements. The rank and file, however, were either foisted upon the city, or else lived off the population directly. There was the police department, and the fire and water departments, and the whole balance of the civil list, from the meanest office boy to the head of a city department; and for the horde who could find no room in these, there was the world of vice and crime, there was license to seduce, to swindle and plunder and prey. The law forbade Sunday drinking; and this had delivered the saloon-keepers into the hands of the police, and made an alliance between them necessary. The law forbade prostitution; and this had brought the "madames" into the combination. It was the same with the gambling-house keeper and the poolroom man, and the same with any other man or woman who had a means of getting "graft," and was willing to pay over a share of it: the green-goods man and the highwayman, the pickpocket and the sneak thief, and the receiver of stolen goods, the seller of adulterated milk, of stale fruit and diseased meat, the proprietor of unsanitary tenements, the fake doctor and the usurer, the beggar and the “pushcart man," the prize fighter and the professional slugger, the race-track “tout,” the procurer, the white-slave agent, and the expert seducer of young girls. All of these agencies of corruption were banded together, and leagued in blood brotherhood with the politician and the police; more often than not they were one and the same person,—the police captain would own the brothel he pretended to raid, the politician would open his headquarters in his saloon. "Hinkydink" or “Bathhouse John," or others of that ilk, were proprietors of the most notorious dives in Chicago, and also the "gray wolves" of the city council, who gave away the streets of the city to the business men; and those who patronized their places were the gamblers and prize fighters who set the law at defiance, and the burglars and holdup men who kept the whole city in terror. On election day all these powers of vice and crime were one power; they could tell within one per cent what the vote of their district would be, and they could change it at an hour's notice.

And so you return to your daily round of toil, you go back to be ground up for profits in the world-wide mill of economic might! To toil long hours for another's advantage; to live in mean and squalid homes, to work in dangerous and unhealthful places; to wrestle with the specters of hunger and privation, to take your chances of accident, disease, and death. And each day the struggle becomes fiercer, the pace more cruel; each day you have to toil a little harder, and feel the iron hand of circumstance close upon you a little tighter. Months pass, years maybe—and then you come again; and again I am here to plead with you, to know if want and misery have yet done their work with you, if injustice and oppression have yet opened your eyes!

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“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, Book Review Example

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The title of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle refers to industrialization in general, and, in particular, turn of the last century America’s meat-packing factories.

Arguably, the main point of Sinclair’s work is to disclose the primitivism and inhumanity behind what is normally conceived as technology and progress. The industrialization of the working class is often portrayed as consistent with the development of society away from agrarian forms of life, but with The Jungle, Sinclair wishes to argue that such “progress” is a basic primitivism. Accordingly, Sinclair wrote this book in order to critique and expose the illusions of capitalist and industrial progress, showing that the living conditions of the average and common man have not changed, despite the apparent advances in technology and styles of work and labor.

The book was written at the beginning of the twentieth century, more specifically 1906, in which the industrial revolution reached its most highest point. The modernization of the types of labor that the working class carried out is viewed by the mainstream discourse as social advancement. The relevance of this time period is for Sinclair clear, because he wants to show that such narratives of progress are a myth.

After inquiring into the biography of Upton Sinclair, it appears clear that he functioned as a type of political activist, for example, also running for governor of California. His biography is consistent with the themes that are explored in The Jungle , to the extent that as a social activist, Sinclair wants to expose the social injustices that confront workers who labor in an industrial setting.

I would suggest that The Jungle accurately reflects many of the historical realities that existed at the time and place in which Sinclair wrote his work. For example, from a political perspective, there was a certain tension existed in between developing issues of worker’s rights and the conditions that workers actually had to function within. The socialist movement, which was strong in Europe and wished to promote worker’s rights against the elite ruling class, is to  a degree expressed in Sinclair’s work, since he seems to be inclined to portray the poor conditions of the average worker. From a business perspective, Sinclair also captures the theme of the tension between capitalist owners of production and the average worker. In other words, industrialization sharply defined class difference: Sinclair, I think, accurately describes the desire for the capitalists to acquire profit at any cost, forgetting the conditions of the worker. Urban life is furthermore described in terms of the centering of life around the place of the factory: workers move from an agricultural lifestyle to the urban-production lifestyle following capitalism and industrialization. Lastly, immigrant life seems to be accurately reflected, since immigrants came to America as a type of underclass that was forced to take the lowest jobs on the social ladder.

Immigrants at the turn of the last century can be said to have experienced two major problems: firstly, discrimination based upon their origins, and secondly, a lack of opportunity in regards to the type of jobs that they could work. In Sinclair’s work, these problems become evident, in so far as a lack of opportunity and a systematic racism define the immigrant’s life. In the last hundred years, it seems that this situation has not changed: for example, if we consider the underclass from Mexico, these individuals perform tasks that the majority of the population does not want to perform. At the same time, these immigrants are also discriminated against.

By attempting to perform a clear description of the conditions of workers, Sinclair tends towards socialism. Capitalism emphasizes profit and competition, entirely overlooking the human dimension of society and the Christian viewpoint to look after one’s neighbor. In this regard, Sinclair gives a strong socialist critique of capitalism, showing the exploitative side of capitalism. I think that Sinclair’s points are valid: where are ethics and compassion in capitalism? Capitalism emphasizes earning money and other material gains at any cost: what Sinclair wants to say is that capitalism is the most primitive system ever designed because it turns workers into slaves for an elite class. I think he succeeds in conveying this point through the vivid imagery of his narrative in The Jungle. The fact that one hundred years after Sinclair’s work, we still do not realize the evils and selfishness of capitalism, despite for example the recent economic crash, exposes the general idiocy of society.

I think the strength of Sinclair’s book is that it shows some of the inhumane conditions which capitalism produces. It therefore serves as a strong argument against the propaganda of capitalism that is spread by the dominant American ideology:  “if you work hard, you can acquire anything.” Hard work does not automatically lead to success, and Sinclair proves this and exposes this myth. What I did not like in Sinclair’s work is that he did not go further in this regard: he should have more explicitly exposed the selfishness of capitalism that puts a large majority of the population in chains at the expense of an elite ruling class. In other words, Sinclair did not do enough to expose the myth of capitalism in America: simply put, he should have been even more radical.

The most important thing I learned from Sinclair’s book  is the long history of capitalist exploitation. The most disturbing aspect of this is that nothing has essentially changed: the elite minority continues to rule the majority working class. This can only be described as a tragedy: Sinclair exposes that the brainwashing of American society has lasted for over and at least one hundred years.

I think Sinclair’s work provides a relevant critique of capitalism and the illusions of the American Dream that should be read by all students. I was both disturbed by the narrative, but also connected it to my own time period and biography. It is an important work that, even though it is written over a century ago, can still contribute to debunking the system we currently live in.

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-21

Chapters 22-26

Chapters 27-31

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Discuss the role that social Darwinist thought plays in The Jungle. In what ways does Sinclair agree with traditional social Darwinists (e.g. Herbert Spencer), and in what ways does he disagree?

What role do Sinclair’s graphic descriptions of spoiled and contaminated meat play in the novel? How do these descriptions relate to other, more symbolic forms of corruption or adulteration?

How does Sinclair depict organized labor in The Jungle ? What does he ultimately argue regarding its ability to address the problems associated with capitalism? Do you agree?

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UPTON SINCLAIR: THE JUNGLE – ESSAY BY RONALD GOTTESMAN

• January 11, 2020

One of the most powerful, most enduring proletarian novels ever published in the United States.

This dramatic and deeply moving story documents the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the century and brings into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share in the American dream.

As Ronald Gottesman points out in his discerning introduction, Upton Sinclair was a passionate believer in the redemption of mankind through social reform. His expose of the interlocking corruption in American corporate and political life was a major literary event when it was published in 1906, and caused an almost immediate reform in pure-food legislation.

by Ronald Gottesman

More than any other novel of its time, The Jungle brought together dramatically and put into sharp moral focus the social, political, and economic problems that lurked below the cheerful surface of American life at the turn of the century. In his passionate, flawed masterpiece, Upton Sinclair provided a voice to the great masses of immigrants who had come to America yearning to be free and comfortable and who had found instead the wage slavery and misery of mill, factory, sweatshop, and slum. Jacob Riis had shown How the Other Half Lives in 1890; Sinclair showed how more than the other half worked in 1905—in conditions of physical danger, insecurity, fear, exploitation, corruption, and filth. The Jungle remains the best and most powerful proletarian novel ever published in the United States. Its agonized cry for justice has reverberated across the years, not least because the conditions it protested have been duplicated as industrialization has spread around the world.

Upton Beall Sinclair, Jr., was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 20, 1878, the only child of Upton Beall and Priscilla (Harden) Sinclair. His paternal great-grandfather, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, a hero of the War of 1812, and one of the founders of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, was the first in a line of distinguished naval officers and Virginia aristocrats—a line that came to a close with the displacement of Confederate supporters following the Civil War. Upton Senior, born a few years before this war, was for a time a wholesale whiskey distributor in Baltimore; in the later 1880s, when the family moved to New York, he sold hats to clothing stores. Throughout his adult life the author’s father was an irregular provider and an alcoholic; he died in 1907 of delirium tremens. Sinclair’s mother also came of a “good Southern family”; her father was a deacon of the Methodist Church in Baltimore and secretary-treasurer of the Western Maryland Railroad. An uncle, John Randolph Bland, founded the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company and became one of the wealthiest men in Baltimore.

As a child, Upton was thus caught between the piety, puritanism, and gentility of his mother, and the poverty and degradation to which his father’s drinking exposed the family. Deeply pained by his father’s lack of self-restraint and frivolousness, young Sinclair turned to his mother for support and affection. But his mother’s lack of intellectual curiosity and her social pretentiousness later created problems in the relationship, and Sinclair had to find a series of surrogates to feed his emotional, moral, and intellectual hunger. As he observed in his autobiography, the favorite theme of his fiction is “the contrast between the social classes”; this contrast between the rich and the poor was the essential material and emotional fact of Sinclair’s childhood, and the driving force behind his mature literary achievement and political commitment.

Sinclair’s childhood and young manhood were spent chiefly in New York City. He did not go to school until he was ten. Since he was an omnivorous and precocious reader, it did not take him long to make up what he had missed. Five days before his fourteenth birthday he entered the College of the City of New York (then an old brick building at Lexington Avenue and Twenty- third Street), from which he graduated in 1897. In the fall of that year, Sinclair entered Columbia University, where he spent three years as a special student, taking courses in philosophy, history, literature, and music with such famous professors as Nicholas Murray Butler, James Harvey Robinson, George Edward Wood- berry, and Edward MacDowell. While Sinclair was a student at CCNY he began to write puzzles, jokes, cartoon captions, and eventually stories for newspapers and magazines. He earned enough money from this activity to be able to leave home for a rented room. As a graduate student at Columbia, he continued to write— he was paid forty dollars a week for Spanish-American War adventure stories by the publisher Street and Smith. Sinclair had entered Columbia with the idea that he would spend a year studying literature and philosophy before going to law school. But the more he read Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, and Shelley, the more convinced he became that he had been chosen to be an artist-prophet who would help usher in a new dawn for mankind.

As an adolescent and a young man, Sinclair attempted to channel his strong religious feelings and moral idealism (and to sublimate his powerful sexual drive) into an art worthy of his divine, fictional, and human idols: Jesus, Hamlet, and Shelley. His first, self- published, novel, Springtime and Harvest (1901), told the “story of a young woman’s soul redeemed by high and noble love.” While there are some references to economic inequities in this sentimental narrative, the object of Sinclair’s criticism is materialism, not capitalism; the mode of reform endorsed is personal purity, not collective political action. At this point in his life—and until he discovered socialism—Sinclair believed that artists had failed society, not vice versa. In the novel’s preface, Sinclair spoke of “a dream” that someday he “might build a tremendous force for the spreading of light” by establishing a library of his own and others’ books “for the purpose of increasing helpful reading among the humble people of our land.” Even in this first book, then, published a year before Sinclair had discovered socialism, were foreshadowed the roles of prophet, reformer, novelist, and publicist that would become so familiar over the next six decades.

Soon after he finished Springtime and Harvest, Sinclair married Meta Fuller, the young woman with whom he had shared his youthful vision in a small cabin by a lake in Quebec. The marriage was ill advised; the fictionalized account of their anguished life together (they were divorced in 1912) is told in Love’s Pilgrimage (1911). The birth of their son, David, on December 1, 1901, simply exacerbated an unhappy relationship for a hopelessly mismatched young couple with no dependable means of support.

Following the terrible disappointment of his hopes for Springtime and Harvest in the fall and winter of 1900-­1901, the Sinclairs left New York in the spring for the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River and a life of primitive simplicity while Upton went to work on his second romantic novel, Prince Hagen: A Fantasy (1903). This book was an outspoken fable—a critique of political, economic, and religious institutions in America. The central creed in this work, however, is not Socialistic. Rather, the author-narrator, reflecting on this “huge, over-grown civilization of ours, this vast, machine-built jungle,” is led to the conclusion that “it must be the fault of the artists, who are its soul; there being among them no man with any thought of strenuous living, or of the need of truth, nor soul to scourge the selfishness, and fire the hearts of the coming men with generous emotion and resolve.” The millennium is still seen under the aspect of beauty, the prophet is still the heroically triumphant artist, the scriptures are still those of literature and romantic music, the hoped- for transformation still an inner, spiritual conversion of the heart.

The manuscript of Prince Hagen was rejected, in the following months, by seventeen magazines and twenty- two publishing houses. One result of this humiliation is apparent in Sinclair’s next book, The Journal of Arthur Stirling, written during the spring and summer of 1902. The story Arthur Stirling tells is one of suicide—of how a “poet and man of genius,” driven to despair by the failure of the public to accept his work and provide him with the modest support he needs to continue writing his poetry, drowns himself in the Hudson River. The journal is not a merely fictional representation of Sinclair’s mood. Sinclair, indeed, turned the fiction into something like fact by actually having Stirling’s obituary published in The New York Times on June 9, 1902— about the time Sinclair finished writing the Journal. This hoax, moreover, was carefully exploited by Sinclair (and an editor at D. Appleton), and when the book was first published, it provoked a small furor of sympathy from a gullible press and public.

The suicide by drowning of Arthur Stirling marks precisely the submersion of the pure poet, the devotee of Art, in Upton Sinclair. Only by means of this symbolic self-execution could Sinclair hope to survive as a man and as a writer—though a writer of a very different kind. Sinclair’s imagination had betrayed him; the feverish pursuit of the cluster of false lights—Art, Beauty, Inspiration, Poetry, Love—had brought him to ruin: his marriage, romantically undertaken, had already become a nightmare; his attempts at “pure” literature had failed to impress either publishers or the public; he was alienated from his family, virtually friendless, and living in poverty.

In the fall of 1902, when Sinclair returned to New York from the Thousand Islands and the Adirondacks, he made the acquaintance of Leonard D. Abbott at the offices of Literary Digest, and through Abbott was introduced to socialism and some influential American Socialists, among them George D. Herron and Gaylord Wilshire. These men, like many other American Socialists, were profoundly religious (Herron had been a Congregationalist clergyman), and it is no wonder that when Sinclair described the experience of discovering socialism he did so as “a conversion,” as “a visitation by angels,” as “the falling down of prison walls about my mind.” Although this fundamentally Christian socialism was to provide the theoretical economic framework for most of the rest of his career, the “principal fact the Socialists had to teach,” Sinclair remarked later, “was that they themselves existed.” His disaffection from a society based, as he saw it, on greed and competitiveness, was already deep. He needed both company and a program of action to serve as support and focus for his high resolve to change things.

Before he could actively participate in Socialist affairs, Sinclair had to discharge the residue of venom he had secreted against a society that had driven him to destroy himself as a Poet. During the winter of 1902-­1903, a time that marked the nadir of his life, Sinclair wrote A Captain of Industry (1906), which he later called the “most ferocious of my stories.”

The book is an uncontrolled narrative of revenge. The summer before, Sinclair had been forced to drown himself, and now he would rise from his watery grave and wreak his vengeance on Satan, in the guise of the wealthy playboy “Robbie” van Rensselaer. The story tells how Robbie’s father, Chauncey, pays off and sends away Daisy, a poor girl with whom his son has been intimate. In very short order, the father dies, Robbie becomes a “captain of industry,” and at forty, though married, falls in love with a young girl. The girl, Mary Harrison, is discovered by the lovers to be Robbie’s daughter by Daisy. When they learn this horrible fact, Mary blows her brains out. But Robbie is not let off so easily. He makes a hundred million dollars on the stock market before he is allowed to get drunk and take his yacht to sea, where it is caught in a storm and all aboard are killed.

The disproportionate detail lavished on the fate of Robbie van Rensselaer’s body is a sign of Sinclair’s rage. All night long, the waves play catch in the moonlight with the body, until, when the “morning broke it was swollen and purple, and it lay half hidden in the sand.” Denied the peace of total destruction or complete burial, the body must undergo still further dishonor before being allowed to return to the “civilized” world of merely hypocritical Fifth Avenue funerals. “Innumerable small creatures” feed on this choice morsel before a poor fisherman can render the final insults of failing to recognize who the dead man is and complaining that “he smells like the devil.” The extreme rancor with which Sinclair satisfied his vendetta is a measure of what he felt he had lost and a warning sign of his inexorability in the future. But for the time being, his outrage was pacified sufficiently to allow him to go on to the more noble, if still bloody, subject of the Civil War.

Just why Sinclair determined to write a fully documented trilogy of novels on the Civil War is not clear. Certainly, if he was going to redeem America it would help to know its history, particularly as that history centered on the exploitation of race and class. Sinclair sought a patron to support him while he did the research and wrote the first volume, and finally persuaded his wealthy Socialist friend George D. Herron to advance him two hundred dollars and to promise a thirty-dollar-a-month stipend for a year.

Armed with Herron’s promise of support, Sinclair belligerently announced his intentions to the world in “My Cause.” 1 In this article Sinclair announced, among other things, that he was going to make his “life work” the completion of a trilogy of novels with the collective title The American. This work “was to be … an attempt to make an imaginative picture of the Civil War, to place it with its agonies and its terrors as a living reality before mankind.” With that typically paradoxical attitude of the native American radical, Sinclair planned to invoke the sacred American past in order to mitigate the profanity of the present. At about the time “My Cause” was published, the Sinclairs moved into two tents north of Princeton, New Jersey.

Manassas , the first volume of the trilogy, was completed in the spring of 1904 and published by Macmillan that August. Although Sinclair hadn’t yet found his true metier—contemporary history as fictional ex­posé —Manassas is marked by certain features and techniques that would become over the years typical patterns and stock devices in his work. Allan Montague is the prototype, in Sinclair’s fiction, of the comfortable and conventional man of basic goodwill who is converted to the role of active moral agent through an intellectual enlightenment that becomes an emotional reaction— that is, having seen the light, he becomes a zealous advocate of reform. The novel is marked also by simplistic conceptions of character and issue. The good are poor, abstinent laborers victimized by the sensual, hard-drinking men of property. Present, too, are a sometimes brilliantly realized rendering of surface detail, a skillful journalistic description of complex processes, and a lucid presentation of complicated issues. Allan’s chance meetings with Jefferson Davis, John Brown, President Lincoln, and others strain credibility severely, but some of the set pieces, once excused, can be appreciated for their effectiveness. And just as the omnipresent Allan Montague foreshadows the ubiquitous Lanny Budd of later days, so does the fundamental failure of achieved form that makes this all-purpose character necessary suggest one of the telling deficiencies of nearly all of Sinclair’s future work.

Ideologically as well as biographically, The Jungle grew out of Manassas . After finishing the Civil War novel, Sinclair devoted himself to reading Socialist theory, and he followed with great interest a strike of the workers in Chicago’s Union Stockyards in the summer of 1904. The news of the strike had appeared in the Socialist paper with the widest circulation, Appeal to Reason . When the strike was finally broken—and the workers forced to resume their difficult and dangerous jobs with little improvement in pay and conditions—Sinclair contributed his first piece of militant Socialist writing to the Appeal .

This took the form of a front-page article—also distributed as a broadside—entitled “You Have Lost the Strike! And Now What Are You Going to Do About It!” Identifying himself as a man who wants neither the workers’ money nor their votes, Sinclair delivers a powerful sermon to those who have been forced back to work. In this incantatory piece, Sinclair delivers the familiar message about the “handful of men” who “own all the instruments and means of production” and who distribute inequitably the profits earned by the sweat of exploited laborers. He concludes with a reminder that the workers’ only hope lies with the Socialist party and its presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs.

Undoubtedly encouraged by Appeal editor Fred D. Warren’s enthusiastic reception of the “Strike” article, Sinclair sent him a copy of Manassas, just published by Macmillan. Warren was greatly impressed by this novel of the Civil War, and especially by the vivid description of the slave’s attempt to escape from his pursuers in the swamps of the Mississippi delta. Warren was so impressed that he suggested Sinclair apply his talents to an expose of the conditions of wage slaves in an industrial setting. Sinclair replied that he would do just that if the Appeal to Reason advanced him the five hundred dollars he required to gather the necessary information and to live for a year while he shaped the data into a novel. With the understanding that the money would be an advance payment for serial rights, the offer was made and accepted.

Long before Sinclair considered Packingtown a likely subject for a novel, the “Beef Trust,” as it was generally called, had been scrutinized and attacked from several directions. During investigations of the charges of graft in connection with the rotten meat supplied to the army during the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt had testified that the meat sent to Cuba was unfit for human consumption. Indeed, Thomas F. Dolan, a former superintendent for the Armour company, had signed an affidavit exposing the common practice of packing condemned meat, a document published in the New York Journal of March 4, 1899. By 1904, when Sinclair first became directly concerned with the Beef Trust, Charles Edward Russell had begun publishing in magazine form the series of articles that would later be gathered into a book, The Greatest Trust in the World (1905). Appeal to Reason, Wilshire’s, and a number of other radical and/or muckraking magazines had also featured articles exposing not only the monopolistic tendencies and exploitative and oppressive tactics of the Chicago packers but also the unspeakably filthy conditions under which the nation’s meat supply was handled. 2 The subject, in short, was a familiar one to reformers and muckraking journalists.

As nearly as can be determined, Sinclair left for Chicago on Wednesday, November 2, 1904, and stayed there for seven weeks, or until about December 21. 3 The first public hint of Sinclair’s work came on January 14, 19o5—just three weeks after he had begun to write his novel—in an article by Josephine Conger , the woman who contributed a regular column directed at the Ap­peal’s female Socialist audience. In this article, flatteringly entitled “Genius and Socialist,” Conger briefly reviewed Sinclair’s previous publications and then confidently announced that the “book that the young author is working on now, ‘The Jungle,’ is destined to be a masterpiece of Socialist literature.” It was hardly a surprise when, three weeks later, there appeared an unsigned announcement that The Jungle would appear serially in the Appeal , beginning on February 28, and would constitute “the Crowning Achievement of the Appeal.” The comrades were assured that “it will be the most powerful story ever written,” that “it will stir the nation.” On February 11 it was announced that “a million copies of no. 482 will be published.” Since the subscription figures for no. 481 totaled 294,868, the editors were obviously hoping that this powerful serial would boost circulation (a hope that was disappointed, since the Appear s subscription figures never went over 300,000 while the serial was running). Along with this front-page announcement, Sinclair provided the following synopsis:

It will set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profits. It will shake the popular heart and blow the top off of the industrial tea-kettle. What Socialism there will be in this book, will, of course, be imminent; it will be revealed by incidents—there will be no sermons. The novel will not have any superficial resemblance to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Fundamentally it will be identical with it—or try to be. It will show the “system working.” It will show Graft in its thousand forms at work slaughtering women and children. Its themes will be the every-day ones of bread and butter; it will have incidents and adventures—a life and death struggle, and a heart-breaking tragedy—the tragedy of life.

The scene will be Chicago and the stockyards strike. I have been there and seen things. But I did not have to go to Chicago to learn of the struggle and of the mental and physical break-down which follows. There will be factories and bad air and accidents and adulterated food. All around will be strikers and employers’ associations and grafting politicians—and Socialists. The reader will get glimpses of various tragedies; there will be, perhaps, a bit of the white slave traffic. There will be foreigners who have come to America to find liberty, and are out of work.

As I said, I will write this book to be read. In the climax of the strike the hero’s wife will give birth to a child. She will be unattended, and, unless I am mistaken, I can make a fruitful tragedy out of this by relating the simple truth, without transgressing the proprieties. The strike fails; the hero is not taken back; his wife is evicted and dies. He tends the baby a while, feeds it poisoned milk and impure drugs, and finally it dies also. Then the hero goes out and hears about anarchism. Anarchists and the social crime and terror that make them have not yet been put into fiction. The hero is making bombs—and then he learns about Socialism. He meets a man—a poor, hunger driven tailor—a Socialist—one of the real heroes of the social revolution—who suddenly causes the whole of the problem to become clear to him—who flashes a light into the farthest depths of the “jungle.”

On the strength of this passionate—if unpolished— prediction of what Sinclair would accomplish (the finished book, of course, differs in several important details), Warren promised to return the special subscription price of twenty-five cents if The Jungle serial did not make the subscription worthwhile.

The first installment of The Jungle: A Story of Chicago was printed on February 25, 1905. Accompanying the first chapter was an editorial note pointing out that the next portion would appear two weeks later, in the issue of March 11. The following week there was evidence that Sinclair had some doubts about the glowing promises that had been made by the Appeal for a book that had not yet been written. Giving voice to his misgivings and at the same time providing some further interesting insights into his conception of the “purpose” and strategy of The Jungle , Sinclair wrote the following letter to Fred Warren at the Appeal to Reason .

Dear Comrades of the Appeal:

I sometimes wonder and worry if this story that I am sending you is what you thought you were going to get. All your large promises have made me afraid. I wonder in particular if the story is going to hold the interest of the reader, as a serial—if it is not moving too slowly. A serial story, you know, generally starts off with a “Hist villain!” in the first paragraph, and a murder on the first page. “The Jungle” does not start that way, and I wonder if some of your readers may not give it up in despair. I trust that you understand what I am trying to do. I do not intend to write a story without climaxes, and without things happening; but I want these things to be real and convincing, and not superficial. That means, as I conceive it, that I have first to make the reader acquainted with an atmosphere and an environment, and that takes time. You see, I have to write a book as well as a serial—something that will, I hope, be doing work when its serial publication is forgotten. I have in “The Jungle” not merely to set forth a tragedy, but to drive home to the dullest reader the truth that this tragedy is, in its every detail, the inevitable and demonstrable consequence of an economic system. If that is to be done, the reader must first have the system in his mind; and concerning the system that prevails in Packingtown, the average American is as ignorant as an unborn babe. My belief is that the majority of the Appeal readers are ignorant of it, and so my hope is that they may find this gradual unfoldment of the little world of the beef trust interesting in itself. At any rate, perhaps you ought to tell them that that is what they are going to get—for a while.

Warren, more confident than the author, simply observed: “I can assure our comrades that his doubts and fears are groundless,” and from March 11, 1905, chapters appeared regularly.

Although the newspaper serialization proceeded straightforwardly, the publishing plot soon began to thicken. A notice for April 15 offered the previously published chapters for thirty cents, these chapters and five more having been published separately in the April issue (no. 33) of Appeal publisher J. W. Wayland’s quarterly, One Hoss Philosophy. By July 8 “the previously printed chapters” (really only twelve of fourteen and a half) were being offered for ten cents. Except for one amusing puff—a James W. Babcock, “author of ‘The Irrepressible Conor,’ etc.,” observed that The  Jungle  “is all meat, and good meat, too”—the serial publication ran its normal course until nearly the end of the book.

The last installment, published in the issue of November 4, took the story only to the point where Jurgis is made an “outcast and a tramp once more.” The third installment of the One Hoss Philosophy version was published in the October issue, and it offered a conclusion to the novel that differed very substantially from that ultimately published in the book version. In it, the  Appeal to Reason is given a plug, the virtues of socialism are cried up, and, with regard to plot, Jurgis is caught by the police when he is spotted at a Socialist rally. With the final appearance of The Jungle in the Appeal , notice is given that the balance of The Jungle will be mailed to anyone who requests it on a postcard.

It seems apparent, then, that sometime later in the summer of 1905 Sinclair began to suffer the difficult problem of resolving the plot of his novel. A quarter of a century later, he recalled in a letter: “I went crazy at the end of that book and tried to put in every thing I knew about the Socialist movement” (September 3, 1930). The family of immigrants had been ground up like so much raw meat, Jurgis crushed and embittered. Then what? To end the story at that point would have been Zola’s way—and in fact the first French translation (1906) terminates about halfway through Chapter 20, when Jurgis is blacklisted in the stockyards—but Sinclair was attempting, as he later said, “to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola.” 4 Shelley-Sinclair would not allow himself to indulge in the attractive but destructive logic of naturalism, to have his protagonist crushed like a bug by forces over which he had no control. He could not, on the other hand, use the facile tricks of serial writing that he had learned as a hack writer. No deus ex machina could be rushed to the scene to pluck the protagonist from his seemingly inevitable doom. Nor was this book a historical novel like Manassas , in which the denouement could be selected (and then applied) from the stockroom of the settled past. Physically and emotionally depleted by the strain of keeping up with the presses and by his steadily worsening relations with his “sister-wife,” Sinclair was temporarily as severely devastated as Jurgis, and unequal to the difficult task of ending his novel without betraying either the inner logic of his materials or the very real demands of his total commitment to melioristic socialism. As Walter Rideout put it succinctly in The Radical Novel in the United States , 1900-1954, Sin­clair had run up against the “central artistic problem” of Socialist fiction: “How to combine the unburdening of capitalist fact with a convincing statement, in fictional terms, of their hope for a different future” (p. 30).

Characteristically, Sinclair renewed himself, at least to some measure of health, through action. During the summer of 1905 he set about founding the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. 5 On September 12, 1905, at a dinner in Peck’s Restaurant, on Fulton Street, New York City, the Society was formally established, with Jack London as president and Upton Sinclair as first vice president. Activities connected with the Society kept him busy until early November, at least, at which point he was able to complete the manuscript of his neglected book. Once the theoretical attractiveness of socialism as the wave of the future had been verified for him both by the voting gains in the 1904 elections and by the favorable response to Jack London’s first talks as president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, Sin­clair could safely commit himself to “ ‘CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!’ ” as a resolution for his novel. Sinclair had had to make the history that he could then exploit for the purposes of his fiction.

Five publishers, including Macmillan, turned down the manuscript before Doubleday, Page accepted it. Even so, it was taken only after an independent investigation corroborated Sinclair’s allegations. Sinclair had in the meantime arranged to issue a “Sustainers’ Edition” to readers of the Appeal under the imprint Jungle Publishing Company. On February 26, 1906, the two first editions were published, the earliest sheets in the run being bound for sale by Doubleday, Page. The  Jungle  was widely noticed in the popular press, sometimes as a literary event, sometimes as a news story. Predictably, conservative publications denounced the book. Edward Clark Marsh in The Bookman (April 1906) declared with respect to Sinclair: “His reasoning is so false, his disregard of human nature so naive, his statement of facts so biassed, his conclusions so perverted, that the effect can be only to disgust any honest, sensible folks with the very terms he uses so glibly.” Elbert Hubbard was even more outraged:

The “Jungle Book” [ sic ] by Upton Sinclair is a libel on the Western farmers who raise the hogs and cattle. It is a libel on the United States inspectors who are employed in the packing-house and render sworn reports of their work to the Government. It is a libel on the workers in the packinghouses, many of whom are people of intelligence, thrift, and genuine worth and merit who own their homes, educate their children and live lives that are above reproach. It is a libel on the men of brain and power who inaugurated these plants and who serve the public and give work to thousands. It is an insult to the intelligent people of America who are asked to read it.

Indeed, so pernicious was the book, Hubbard concluded, that it was “bound to increase the death rate.” Less extravagantly, The New York Times reviewer contemptuously dismissed the naive Socialist assumptions of the author.

Those who shared Sinclair’s political perspective came to very different conclusions, of course. Eugene Debs, the Socialist party’s perennial candidate for the presidency, declared: “It marks an epoch in revolutionary literature.” The radical feminist Charlotte Perkins Gil­man wrote: “That book of yours is unforgettable. I should think the Beef Trust would buy it up at any price—or you, if they could.” In two successive issues of T.P.O. (the magazine named for the Irish journalist and nationalist T. P. O’Connor) in June 1906, young Winston Churchill reviewed the novel perceptively and at great length, praising particularly Sinclair’s rhetorical skill in achieving his purpose: “to make the great Beef Trust stink in the nostrils of the world, and so contaminate the system upon which it has grown to strength.” There is no question, however, that the novel’s most important reader was President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who promoted himself as a “trustbuster,” had been sent an advance copy. Finley Peter Dunne, one of the wittiest journalists of the time, described the President’s reaction through the eyes of “Mr. Dooley”:

‘Th’hayro is a Lithuanian, or as ye might say, Pollacky, who left th’barb’rous land iv his birth an’ come to this home iv oppochunity where ivery man is th’ equal iv ivery other man befure th’ law if he isn’t careful…. Annyhow, Tiddy was toying with a light breakfast an’ idly turnin’ over th’ pages iv th’ new book with both hands. Suddenly he rose fr’m th’ table, an’ cryin’: ‘I’m pizened,’ began throwin’ sausages out iv th’ window   Since thin th’ Prisidint, like th’ rest iv us, has become a viggytaryan, an’ th’ diet has so changed his disposition that he is writin’ a book called ‘Supper in Silence,’… [and] Congress decided to abolish all th’ days iv th’ week except Friday.”

Comic hyperbole aside, Roosevelt did write to Sinclair and promised to have the novelist’s charges fully investigated. Sinclair, concerned that official visitors would not get the full truth, barraged the President with advice about how to proceed. Roosevelt passed his suggestions on to Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson, admonishing him: “We cannot afford to have anything perfunctory done in this matter.”

At the same time, Roosevelt lectured Sinclair about his “pathetic belief” in socialism. “Personally,” the President continued, “I think that one of the chief early effects of such attempt to put socialism of the kind there [in The Jungle ] preached into practice, would be the elimination by starvation, and the diseases, moral and physical, attendant upon starvation, of that same portion of the community on whose behalf socialism would be invoked.” 6

Whatever political differences separated the two men, when the report of Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and a social worker named James Bronson Reynolds, fully confirming Sinclair’s charges, came back to Roosevelt, he used it—or the threat of disclosing its contents—to move the long-stalled Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act through Congress. These acts became law on June 30, 1906, the culmination of a quarter of a century of investigation into the adulteration of foodstuffs and patent medicines by Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief of the Bureau of Chemistry in the Department of Agriculture from 1883 to 1912.

The Jungle’s extraordinary initial success—it became an international best-seller within weeks—can be explained in several ways. In the first place, The Jungle capitalized on the strong contemporary interest in ex­posé. In the last half of the nineteenth century—at least since the publication of Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861) —Americans had displayed an increasing appetite for that particular form of the literature of exposure known as muckraking. Americans have always responded to writing that calls attention to discrepancies between the ideal and the actual, but with the growth of literacy and the spread of mass-circulation magazines and newspapers at the turn of the century, shocking news about corporate and political wrongdoing—usually interrelated—became big business. Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil  Company  (1904), Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904), and David Graham Phillips’s The Treason of the Senate (1906) all first appeared serially in such leading journals of the day as McClure’s Magazine , Cosmopolitan , Everybody’s , and the Independent. No area of American business or government, no abuse of power was safe from the forerunners of what are familiar today as investigative reporters.

Sinclair’s expose of the meatpacking industry hit home with readers regardless of their ideological commitments. The scandalous behavior of captains of industry and their political lieutenants might cause the moral gorge to rise in some; accounts of the presence of chemicals, diseased meat, and rodent excrement in one’s morning sausages made the stomach rebel in everyone. Sinclair had inadvertently discovered an important principle of modern-day reform: involve the public in the pain caused by the deficiency in need of remedy.

A convincing case can also be made that The Jungle was immediately appealing because it showed more than any other novel of protest the structural, interlocking nature of corruption in American life: the interdependence of urban politics and urban crime; the symbiosis of corporate graft and precinct patronage; the direct linkage of the disintegration of the family, alcoholism, ill health, and despair. Efficiency, competitiveness, and materialism, Sinclair showed, were worshiped at great social cost. The Jungle revealed dramatically the consequences of the convergence of the rapid spread of technology, the flood of immigration, the urbanization of the population, the centralization of finance, and the domination of government by business.

Why, though, does The Jungle survive as a classic? The story The Jungle tells is of the Fall of the House of Rudkus—of how a peasant family from Lithuania comes to America determined to make a better life, and of how it is ineluctably drawn into the gears of competitive capitalism and chewed up by what Sinclair characterized as predatory greed. This story, of course, is the archetypal American narrative of disappointed expectations—the familiar American story of failure, of soured hopes, of emotional alienation and cultural confusion in place of community and identity. The Jurgis Rudkus myth of failure is the other side of the Horatio Alger myth of success. Underneath the despair, however, is the even more profoundly American story of survival against great odds: Ishmael in Moby-Dick eludes disaster as an orphan riding a coffin; Huck Finn evades the logic of his drift into the heart of darkness by lighting out for the Territory. So, in the last five chapters of The Jungle , Jurgis (like Tom Joad in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath) is renewed by the promise of the coming victory of socialism. In terms of the narrative that comes before it, the conclusion is unconvincing; but Sinclair’s denial of darkness is not alien as a theme in American literature, which has always tried to make the best of disappointment and disaster.

Finally, Sinclair created a masterpiece that is of continuing interest not only for what it shows us about the time and place in which it was written but for what it tells us of the painful human condition of most men, women, and children before and since, in America and elsewhere. For once in his career, Sinclair united his psychic anguish to his intellectual analysis, joined his personal agony to the suffering of this immigrant family. That is why, despite our easy (and valid) objection to the breakdown of the narrative, The Jungle lives in our imaginations not in pieces but as a sympathy-stirring whole. The wedding with which the novel opens celebrates Sinclair’s deep connection with his subject— a bond that survives the failure of his narrative ingenuity and ties us unforgettably to the wretched of the earth. 7

The publication of The Jungle made Sinclair an international celebrity overnight and earned him thirty thousand dollars within a few months. But fame and fortune did not bring him health, happiness, or political or artistic success. In fact, Sinclair spent the next decade in a restless search for physical well-being, a permanent base of operations, and new subjects appropriate to his talents as a writer. In the process, he established a cooperative living colony at Helicon Hall in New Jersey, became a Socialist party candidate for Congress, wrote eight novels, three nonfiction books, several plays, and scores of articles on personal as well as social problems.

In The Industrial Republic (1906) Sinclair speculated on the future of America, predicting that William Ran­dolph Hearst would defeat Theodore Roosevelt in the election of 1912 and oversee the rapid development of a Utopian Socialist state from the rubble of shattered capitalism. While it makes claims to be scientific and empirical, the book is best understood as an unsuccessful attempt to find historical grounds for the essentially millennarian vision that somehow sustained Sinclair’s hope through a lifetime of disappointment over the slow pace of social change.

From the time Helicon Hall was destroyed by fire, in March 1907, until he settled in Pasadena, California, in 1916, Sinclair was seldom in one place for more than a few months at a time. He lived in Socialist and single-­tax colonies, spent time at the Kellogg sanitarium in Michigan, crossed the country a couple of times, made visits to Bermuda and Europe, and, after his divorce in 1912 and marriage to Mary Craig Kimbrough the following year, lived in Mississippi for nearly two years. During these years he wrote prolifically about health and diet for Bernarr Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine and devoted books to Good Health and How We Won It (1909, co-authored by Michael Williams) and The Fasting Cure (1911), books that anticipate by seventy years current popular American obsessions.

More central to Sinclair’s social concerns in this period are three novels, The Metropolis and The Money-changers (both 1908), and Samuel the Seeker (1910). The first is an expose of upper-class profligacy and venality; the second offers a weak, fictionalized account of J. P. Morgan’s stock-market manipulations and the panic of 1907. Samuel the Seeker is a parable of the conversion of a religious seeker to socialism. A more important book is the painfully autobiographical Love’s Pilgrimage (1911), a thinly veiled account of the emotional and sexual tensions that characterized the troubled relationship between Upton and Meta Sinclair. Three other novels, Sylvia (1913), Sylvia’s Marriage (1914), and  Damaged Goods (1913), awkwardly and unconvincingly joined Sinclair’s interest in heath and disease—specifically venereal disease—to his interest in social and economic reform.

In King Coal (1917), Sinclair returned to the subject of The Jungle , the grim life of unorganized industrial workers. In this case, the workers are the miners in the Colorado coalfields, whose attempts to unionize in 1913 and 1914 had been brutally suppressed, most notably by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, a Rockefeller subsidiary. News of the “Ludlow Massacre,” in April 1914, inspired Sinclair to organize a demonstration in New York City in front of the Standard Oil Company offices. As a result of the demonstration, Sinclair was kept in jail for two days. Soon after his release, he traveled to Colorado to investigate the miners’ life. Although other projects—especially compilation of the comprehensive anthology of social protest The Cry of Justice (1915)—kept Sinclair from converting this experience into a novel for a couple of years, the result of its long gestation (and elaborate revision) was Sinclair’s best book in a decade. Indeed, his depiction of the virtual slavery of coal miners and their families in oppressive, isolated company towns was to represent his best fictional work for another decade—until the publication in 1927 of Oil!

Whether or not the lack of popularity of King Coal was the result of America’s entry into World War I, there can be little doubt that organized socialism was a casualty of that war. At any rate, Sinclair was one of those who resigned from the party in 1917, having decided that the threat of German militarism must be dealt with, even if that meant supporting President Wilson’s war policy. Partly to demonstrate his continued commitment to the spirit of socialism, partly to justify his support of American policy, Sinclair started in 1918 a monthly journal, Upton Sinclair’s , one feature of which was a serialized version of Jimmy Higgins , a novel that recorded his increasing disillusionment over America’s part in the military action against the Bolshevik revolution.

Sinclair’s disenchantment with American life is also reflected in an important series of six nonfiction attacks on capitalist institutions which he characterized as the “Dead Hand” series. The Profits of Religion (1918) offers an outline of the collaboration of institutionalized religion with oppressive regimes in Western history; The Brass Check (1920), for which he drew on his own experiences with the press, reveals the prostitution of journalism to commercial interests; The Goose-Step (1923) and The Goslings ( 1924) suggest, respectively, the power of interlocking directorates over higher education and their power over public and parochial schools; Mammonart (1925) attacks the class bias of most Western art and artists, while Money Writes! (1927) addresses the bourgeois servility of the vast majority of modern writers. Perhaps because these books are ideologically simplistic, perhaps because they fed an appetite for scandal and an anti-intellectual strain in American life, they were popular as well as notorious.

The publication of Oil! (1927) restored Sinclair’s claim as a serious novelist. Set chiefly in the oil fields of Southern California, drawing on the events surrounding the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration, and centering on the moral, social, and political education of a young man, Bunny Ross, the novel vividly incorporates many features of American life in the 1920s, from flappers and football games to strikes and political corruption. For the first time in his career Sinclair also created multidimensional characters whose actions and thoughts manifest their individual natures rather than illustrate ideological positions. Oil! was as close as Sinclair was to come to the poetic power of F. Scott Fitz­gerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), which explores a similar theme.

The arrest and trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti and their execution in August 1927 galvanized liberal and radical opinion in America as no other event before or since, and it was inevitable that Sinclair would seek to call attention to the tragic injustice they paid for with their lives. This he did in his powerful two-volume novel Boston (1928), which not only provides a vivid and detailed history of this seven-year-long cause célèbre but also records the poisonous climate of social, economic, and political prejudice that prevailed in Boston and across the country in the 1920s. Few other works of history or fiction provide such a compelling sense of the dynamics of the decade; no other work offers such a believable portrait of the American immigrant as martyred hero.

Sinclair turned fifty soon after Boston was published, but for three more decades his energy and literary output were startlingly prodigious. He wrote more than forty-five books in this period, undertook the financing of a film by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein ran for governor of California, and remained active in a wide range of liberal and radical social and political causes. Many of his publications were weak; some were devoted to his persistent interest in religion, psychic phenomena, and alcoholism. His gubernatorial campaign made him a national figure and the massive eleven- volume Lanny Budd series made him, for the first time since The Jungle , a best-selling author.

Though as a Socialist he had been a congressional candidate in 1906, 1920, and 1922, and a gubernatorial candidate in 1926 and 1930, these candidacies were nominal. He did not campaign actively—except by writing articles—and his objective was educational. But by 1933 the Depression was deep and pervasive, and Sinclair decided that the times required dramatic change. He registered as a Democrat, accepted the call to enter the primary, wrote I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty (1933), and soon emerged as the leader of the EPIC (End Poverty in California) movement.

The EPIC campaign, with its espousal of production for use rather than for profit, was bound to provoke powerful opposition, and once Sinclair had won the primary, the major newspapers, the movie industry, and large corporate interests combined forces to attack him with unprecedented ferocity. In the end, Republican Frank Merriam won, but California politics were permanently changed, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was encouraged to move national Democratic policy to the left. Within a few weeks, Sinclair wrote I, Candidate for Governor—And How I Got Licked (1935).

The last major achievement of Sinclair’s literary career was the monumental series of long historical novels usually called the Lanny Budd series. Beginning with World’s End (1940) and ending with The Return of Lanny Budd (1953), these eleven books provide a detailed if simplified panorama of Western history from 1913 to 1949. The central figure of the series is Lanny Budd, a composite of several men Sinclair knew—art dealer Martin Birnbaum and Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., among them. More important, as William A. Bloodworth has observed in his fine study of Sinclair, “Lanny Budd is Sinclair’s overextended metaphor for the nineteenth century sensibility forced to exist in the troubled modern world.” Lanny’s response to these troubles turns him, as they did Sinclair, first into a Socialist, then into a liberal Democrat, next into an anti-Fascist, and finally into an almost paranoid anti-Communist. The series was immensely popular, and the third volume, Dragon’s Teeth (1942), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. Sinclair continued writing well into his eighties. He died at the age of ninety in 1968.

As Van Wyck Brooks observed, Sinclair is hard to be right about. His production as a writer was so large and various that he defies easy categorization. Moreover, Sinclair was not only a writer, or a thinker, or a social and political activist. He was, above all, a moral force in the prophetic American tradition that has its religious roots in William Bradford and its secular branches in Michael Harrington and Ralph Nader. Sinclair early recognized and spent a lifetime decrying the pernicious effects of modern industrial capitalism. From start to finish he was a profoundly passionate believer in the possibility of the redemption of man through the reform of society, a deeply compassionate human being for whom the cause of universal social justice was a consuming calling. He was, in Emerson’s phrase, a man of good hope.

1. Independent 55 (May 14, 1903): 1121-26.

2. See, especially, Ernest Poole, “The Meat Strike,” Independent (July 18, 1904): 179-84. See also Louis Filler, The Muckrakers: Crusaders for American Liberalism , pp. 157-70. Chapter 7 of Carl S. Smith’s Chicago and the American Literary Imagination provides a rich account of “The Stockyards” in fact and fiction.

3. See Appeal to Reason (November 17, 1906): 4. A news item dated November 3 quotes Sinclair as having said, the previous evening: “ ‘It happens by a curious coincidence to be just exactly two years ago tonight since I set out for Chicago to study the meat-packing industry.’ ” Forty years later he claimed that he arrived in Chicago on September 20, his twenty-sixth birthday (Introduction to the Viking Press Edition, The Jungle [New York, 1946], p. 7). He may, of course, have been attempting to dramatize the occasion in both instances—or he may simply have forgotten the date he left New York.

4. “What Life Means to Me,” Cosmopolitan 41 (October 1906): 594.

5. He had announced his intention of organizing the Intercollegiate Socialist Society as early as December 12, 1904; Sinclair had learned nothing of socialism in eight years of college and was determined that future college students should have the opportunity to learn about Socialist thought, if only outside the normal curriculum.

6. Quoted in Leon Harris’s richly detailed biography Upton Sinclair: American Rebel , p. 87.

7. See, however, Michael Brewster Folsom’s “Upton Sinclair’s Escape from The Jungle : The Narrative Strategy and Suppressed Conclusion of America’s First Proletarian Novel.” Folson sees The Jungle as “one of those compelling, garbled, perplexing, sometimes amusing encounters between the conventionally literate and the working class which became a fixture of imaginative life in America by the end of the nineteenth century.” The heart of Folsom’s argument is put thus: “As Sinclair worked out his plot during the months of crisis in his personal, political, and imaginative life, the great gulf widened between Sinclair, the expensively educated professional writer, and the humble working stiffs who peopled his brilliant early chapters. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant petit-bourgeois intellectual triumphed over realism, Socialism, the alien working class, and serious literature” (p. 248)

Suggestions for Further Reading

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Avon Books, 1969.

Becker, George J. “Upton Sinclair: Quixote in a Flivver.” College English 21 (1959): 133-40.

Biella, Arnold P. “Upton Sinclair: Crusader.” Ph.D diss., Stanford University, 1954.

Blinderman, Abraham, ed. Critics on Upton Sinclair. Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1975.

Bloodworth, William A., Jr. “The Early Years of Upton Sinclair: The Making of a Progressive Christian Socialist.” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1972.

————. Upton Sinclair. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Brooks, Van Wyck. The Confident Years. New York: Dutton, 1952.

————. Emerson ana Others. New York: Dutton, 1927.

Cantwell, Robert. “Upton Sinclair.” In After the Genteel Tra- aition , edited by Malcolm Cowley. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964.

Chalmers, David Mark. The Social and Political Ideas of the Muckrakers. New York: Citadel, 1964.

Dell, Floyd. Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest. New York: George H. Doran, 1927.

Dickstein, Morris. Introduction to The Jungle. New York: Bantam, 1981.

Downs, Robert B. Afterword to The Jungle. New York: New American Library, 1960.

Egbert, Donald Drew. Socialism and American Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.

Filler, Louis. The Muckrakers: Crusaders for American Liberalism. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968.

Folsom, Michael B. “Literary Radicalism and the Genteel Tradition: A Study of the Principal Literary Works of the American Socialist Movement Before 1912.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1972.

————. “Upton Sinclair’s Escape from The Jungle: The Narrative Strategy and Suppressed Conclusion of America’s First Proletarian Novel.” Prospects 4 (1979) : 237-66.

Fretz, Lewis A. “Upton Sinclair: The Don Quixote of American Reform.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1970.

Gilbert, James Burkhart. Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968.

Gottesman, Ronald. A Catalogue of Books, Manuscripts , and Other Materials from the Upton Sinclair Archives. Bloomington, Ind.: Lilly Library, 1963.

————. “Upton Sinclair: An Annotated Bibliographical Cat­alogue, 1894—1932.” Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1964.

————. Upton Sinclair: An Annotated Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973.

Gottesman, Ronald, and Charles L. P. Silet. The Literary Manuscripts of Upton Sinclair. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1972.

Harris, Leon. Upton Sinclair: American Rebel. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975.

Hicks, Granville. “The Survival of Upton Sinclair.” College English 4 (1943): 213-20.

Jones, Howard Mumford. The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865-1914. New York: Viking, 1971.

Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. New York: Doubleday, 1955.

Koerner,J. D. “The Last of the Muckrake Men.” South Atlantic Quarterly 55 (1956): 221-32.

Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.

Millgate, Michael. American Social Fiction. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964.

Quint, Howard H. “Upton Sinclair’s Quest for Artistic Independence—1909.” American Literature 29 (1957): 194— 202.

Rideout, Walter B. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900 – 1954. New York: Hill and Wang, 1956.

Shannon, David A. The Socialist Party of America: A History. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

Smith, Carl S. Chicago and the American Literary Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Straumann, Heinrich. American Literature in the Twentieth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

Swados, Harvey. “The World of Upton Sinclair.” Atlantic Monthly 208 (December 1961): 96-102.

Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877-192o. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

Yoder, Jon. Upton Sinclair. New York: Ungar, 1975.

Zanger, Martin. “Politics of Confrontation: Upton Sinclair and the Launching of the ACLU in Southern California.” Pacific Historical Review 38 (November 1969): 383-406.

Source: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle , with an Introduction by Ronald Gottesman, Penguin Books, South Boston, 1985

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Back to “The Jungle”: A View from the Twenty-first Century – by Eric Schlosser

Despite almost a century separating two publications on the meat industry in the United States, the works of Upton Sinclair and Eric Schlosser contain eerily similar accounts in attempt to expose the dangers behind our food.

The Jungle (1906) – by Upton Sinclair

As a young man of 26 years, Sinclair spent seven weeks observing the daily lives of individuals who worked in the meat packing industry in Chicago’s Packingtown. Being from the South, an area torn by the Civil War, he hated poverty and its effects on humans.

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Upton Sinclair

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Book Review

The jungle book review.

In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair weaves the plight of immigrant workers in the late 1800’s into an emotionally compelling narrative that chronicles the hardships of a Lithuanian family that has just moved to Chicago. Sinclair uses the brutal and emotionally hard-hitting story of this family (which is mostly run by the patriarch, Jurgis) and the trials it faces as a tool by which to rationalize his socialist views and as a method by which to convince the reader of these views’ correctness. Over the course of the novel, Sinclair highlights certain portions of capitalist philosophy that he believes are inhumane or ironic, and he depicts capitalism to be an evil that leeches off of Jurgis and his family. By unearthing the inherent problems in American capitalism, Sinclair effectively defaces the pompous idea of the ‘American dream’ of the 1800’s, replacing it with a sense of skepticism towards the American capitalist system.

Sinclair opens the story with the wedding feast of two central characters, Ona and Jurgis. From the start, the evils of the American system can be seen; in the opening pages of the book, Sinclair describes ‘leeches’ at the wedding feast, saying that these immoral people came to the feast, ate, and left without giving back. He blatantly blames this on the unfairness of the American system, saying that “since they [Ona, Yurgis, and their family] had come to the new country, all this was changing”, with the word “this” referring to the good-heartedness that was present in Lithuania, but absent in America (17). As the story progresses, Sinclair tears down the seemingly perfect idea of the American dream piece by piece. He highlights the irony of the “realization of triumph [that] swept over” Jurgis upon getting a job by immediately following it with gruesome descriptions of the working conditions at Packingtown (34). Soon after this, Sinclair clearly articulates his thesis through Tamoszius Kuszleika’s comment about the omnipresent and ubiquitous nature of corruption in a capitalist society. In this seemingly methodical way, Sinclair sheds light on his contentions with capitalism, and he concludes by offering his alternative; socialism. The last three chapters are largely a method by which Sinclair propagandizes his views, abandoning the narrative and offering his solution to the problems he has previously explored.

While The Jungle effectively does its job in bringing the problems of corruption and sanitation in the workplace to light, it contains more than a few flaws in terms of its usefulness as an all-encompassing account of the labor front in the late 1800’s. The roots of the narrative’s bias can be traced to its purpose; Sinclair, in writing the book, tries to convince the reader of the evils of capitalism and the beauty of socialism, and he does this by using the harsh story of Jurgis’ family as a way to appeal to the reader’s emotions. This very nature of the book as a method of political propaganda renders a bias inevitable; the fact that it was written as a political weapon rather than a historical account of a time period guarantees that one side of the argument will be glorified and the other will be ignored. Therefore, when reading The Jungle, the reader is, by design, only exposed to the immigrant’s side of the story and no one else’s. Furthermore, one must ultimately treat Sinclair’s writing with skepticism, as the narrative is a work of fiction. Even though he uses legitimate evidence in order to construct his story, one must realize that ultimately, Sinclair is trying to convince the reader of a certain view, and that he has employed the use of fiction in many parts of the book. While the narrative does expose many horrific, sometimes hard-to-digest truths about the evils of capitalism, in the end, its form and function take away from its value as a complete historical account, as it fails to give the reader a complete and overall historical truth.

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Essay on The Jungle Upton Sinclair

The condition of the working class in the US at the beginning of the 20 th century was extremely challenging since workers had to struggle for survival on the daily bases that can be clearly seen from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. However, in the course of time, the situation did not change in principle because the US did not conduct systematic socioeconomic reforms that would eliminate conditions for the exploitation of a large group of people by a few for the benefit of the few, while the large part of the population remains at the risk of economic disaster. At this point, the recent economic recession is the best evidence of the lack of such reforms. This is why just like a hundred years ago, the US still faces the problem of the social injustice with the severe exploitation of employees, whose only source of income is scarce wages, while a few families concentrate in their hands the lion share of the national wealth and have a considerable and determinant impact not only on the US economy but also politics.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair does not just show horrors of the life of American workers on the dawn of the 20 th century but also and mainly the book uncovers intrinsic pitfalls of the capitalist system of the US, where workers and employees are doomed to struggle for survival, while the upper-class rips off a lion share of the national wealth. In such a way, the analysis of the condition of the working class in the US leads the author to the only conclusion that the US socio-economic and political system needs changes with the shift toward socialist state, where the government can take responsibility for citizens and the national wealth should be redistributed wisely and fairly.

At the same time, The Jungle gives multiple implications to the contemporary labor relations which are still vulnerable to the same pitfalls which persist because of the nature of the US capitalist system and traditions of the US labor relations. First of all, Sinclair shows clearly the wide gap between the employer and the employee. The main character of the book is struggling for survival, while owners of plants rip off high profits and stay wealthy. In such a way, the author clearly shows the wide gap between the rich and poor in the US, which is actually the gap between owners of businesses and their employees. In actuality, this trend persists, although it is not so obvious as it used to be in the past. In fact, the gap between owners of business and employees was the distinct feature of capitalism and this gap could be easily traced since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the US (Zinn 143). More important, the beginning of the industrial revolution accelerated the widening gap between owners of businesses and large corporations, on the one hand, and workers on the other.

Furthermore, the author of The Jungle raises the issue of the workplace safety and conditions of work of workers in the meatpacking industry in Chicago in the early 20 th century and reveals that conditions of work were unbearable. Employees worked for twelve or fourteen hours. Employers recruited workers at the possibly lower price, even if workers were not trained to work in the meatpacking industry. For example, the child labor was a norm, although children were not always physically capable to afford working in meatpacking companies. As a result, they faced a higher risk of injuries in the workplace environment.

In fact, Sinclair shows that the workplace safety was extremely low and employees were at the high risk of injury as was the case of Jurgis friends, family members and Jurgis himself. At the same time, the injury of workers often meant the loss of job that proves that the early 20 th century workers were not protected in their rights. At this point, it is worth mentioning the fact that legal acts that legally protected employees, who suffered injuries or had disabilities, were introduced only in the late 20 th century, for example the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (Faragher 210). Therefore, the negligence of employers and lack of concerns about their employees’ health was a norm in the US in the past and this attitude has persisted, to a significant extent today, since many employers are dissatisfied with the growing pressure on them in terms of the enhancement of the workplace safety environment. The lack of attention to the safety of employees from the part of employers was the evidence of their indifference in relation to employees, even if employees suffered severe injuries leading to disabilities or death. Researchers (Zinn 145) explain such indifference by the traditionally high level of individualism in the US society which originates from the colonization era and frontier time.

In addition, the poor work place safety and indifference of employers to the life and health of their workers was also the evidence of the lack of the social security. For example, when Jurgis suffered the injury and could not work, he was just fired and he had not got any means for living. His employer did not even try to offer him some compensations. Therefore, his employer viewed him as a mere tool that he used for his personal enrichment. The owner of the company was interested in increase of his wealth and he did grow richer, while workers kept living in poverty struggling for survival and having no social security that means that they could not count on any support from the part of the company or government, if they suffered injuries, fell ill or retired.

Furthermore, the book also uncovers such problems as sexual harassment, as was the case of Jurgis’ sister, who was sexually abused by her boss, although she was a minor. In fact, she had no other choice because the work was the only way for her to survive. The problem of the sexual harassment was a norm because the attempt of Jurgis to regain justice and revenge on his sister’s boss resulted in Jurgis’ imprisonment.

All these facts reveal the poor protection of employees’ rights or the lack of such rights. In fact, the early 20 th century employment relations were characterized by the poor protection of employees’ rights and lack of such rights and the story described by Sinclair became the precursor of the Great Depression. However, this story revealed roots of problems that eventually led to the Great Depression. Sinclair shows that the US had systematic, intrinsic pitfalls that were deep-rooted in the American socioeconomic system based on principles of open market economy and capitalism. At this point, it is worth mentioning the fact that employees were in a disadvantaged position in all industries. For example, when Jurgis experienced the work of a farm worker, he found out that farm workers had no chance for stable and good life based on high income because farmers need them as long as they need their labor and this is the case of all industries. This trend was very strong during the industrial revolution and the early 20 th century in the US. More important, this trend persists today.

The major problem of the capitalist system uncovered by Sinclair and that really existed in the early 20 th century as well as it exists now is the problem of the social injustice caused by the focus of employers on their well-being regardless of needs of employees. In fact, the only purpose of employers described by Sinclair was to maximize their profits. This is why they employed children, did not care about workplace safety and health of their employees. Instead, they viewed their employees as mere commodities, which they used to grow richer.

Moreover, the state supported employers and stood for their interests rather than for interests of employees. At this point, it is possible to return to the case of the rape of Jurgis’ sister by her boss. Jurgis was arrested immediately for his attempt to revenge on the rapist. The police reacted immediately, when the life and health of a rich person was at stake. On the other hand, the police did nothing to investigate the case of the rape and prosecute the rapist. This case is the evidence that the socioeconomic injustice and the privileged position of the rich, on the one hand, and the oppressed position of the poor, on the other, was maintained by the state through the criminal justice system, laws and policies conducted by the state. Such injustice could be traced throughout the history of the US, especially starting from the industrial revolution, when social inequalities became particularly obvious due to the fast enrichment of the few at cost of the pauperization of a large part of the US society.

Thus, the book Jungle by Upton Sinclair reveals the social injustice that persisted in the US in the early 20 th century. However, the book raises many issues, which are still relevant today, such as the workplace safety, employees’ rights, labor relations, government policies in relation to labor relations, sexual harassment, social security and injustice and many other important issues. Upton Sinclair shows the desperate position of the working class in the US and clearly indicates the shift to socialism as the only solution to the problem of social injustice. In this regard, his solution is debatable but the point is that problems raised by Sinclair in his book were and, to a certain extent, are relevant and affect many people. The economic disparity and the unfair redistribution of the national wealth is the major problem that causes other issues and widens gaps between the rich and the poor in the US.

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The Jungle Book Review: Upton Sinclair

Author Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a fiction story but has very much real stories that happened in early beginnings of meat packing industries. I believe Upton Sinclair's purpose of the book was to expose but also to connect the argument of how immigrants were treated in such fields of labor. The book went into great detail about how immigrants lived and survived these harsh conditions of there jobs and neighborhoods. Immigrants who worked in 1900s and even now still face many of the same obstacles such as low wages and low tier work conditions. This book allowed me to understand why there is inspection acts in food departments.

The story takes place In Chicago where Ona Lukoszaite and Jurgis Rudkus originally from Lithuania now married were making way to Chicago. They moved to America in hopes of finding a better life in means of work. They thought America had more freedom and they would live the American Dream. On page 14 of the book it states "It was in the stockyards that Jonas' friend had gotten rich, and so to Chicago the party was bound.

They knew that one word, Chicago and that was all they needed to know, at least, until they reached the city." The plan was to go to Chicago and for Jurgis to get a job and support his few relatives that immigrated with him as well as his wife. He plans to work harder and earn more money because they were not the wealthiest family and were highly in debt. Little does he know that In Chicago at the time men women and children all worked long hours for the most part.

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When they arrived at Chicago they felt lost and had no idea of how they were gonna get employed. Jurgis finally gets a job and is excited his job is sweeping cattle guts into a trapdoor. He finds out that his co-workers all hate their jobs and neighborhood. The original plan is not successful as he realizes all his friends and relatives he left with will need a job for them to survive. His wife, dad and relatives all get a job. Ona was supposed to be a housewife she soon must go to work in order to provide for the family. His dad has a hard time landing a job due to old age but eventually gets one sweeping up brine.

Dede Antanas, Jurgis dad realizes the terrible work conditions and bad hygiene practices. As an effect the plan takes a hard left as work is causing health risks to everyone. He explains that the meat packing industries are dirty and unsanitary. Most of the times spoiled meat will be used and shipped out for sale. They even sold rotten pieces of animals. In the factories pieces of dead animals were added to the meat. And the bosses did not care and only want faster production.

Since there were more immigrants looking for jobs than jobs to give almost all workers only made a few cents per hour. Due to these terrible conditions Dede Antanas dies the labor breaks his body down. Ona also dies the tough labor decays her body after she is raped and beaten by one of the factory foremen named . Due to being raped she dies during her birth and the baby does also.

I think the author made some good points in explaining in great detail about some of the practices in these packing houses that led to and caused many illnesses and deaths. This gave us the readers a better understanding because it allowed us to see how unsanitary these places were and how the bosses only cared about the money.

The structure of the book was in chapters and the author made it easier to understand the main idea and points given to the reader. The author made it a little easier to comprehend the book by telling it in order but at times did get a little to dull and had some paragraphs where it explained unclear points. The book is a little long but has a lot of background info and explains the lives and and information about the topic.

According to Upton Sinclair he summed up his purpose in writing The Jungle in the following quote: "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach." Sinclair wanted to expose the terrible conditions faced by immigrants as they tried to survive in Chicago's Meatpacking District. This shows that the people of the U.S. at the time were being lied to and mislead on how there food was being made.

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The Jungle Book Review: Upton Sinclair. (2018, Aug 27). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/the-jungle-book-review-upton-sinclair/

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