The Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
Summary
Jurgis Rudkus arrives in Chicago from Lithuania with his extended family, certain that hard work in the meatpacking plants will buy them a decent American life. Sinclair spends the book taking that certainty apart piece by piece: wage theft, crippling injury, a corrupt foreman who coerces Jurgis's wife Ona, a jail term after Jurgis attacks the man responsible, and a string of deaths in the family, including Ona's in childbirth and their young son's drowning in a flooded street, that leave Jurgis with nothing left to protect. He drifts into vagrancy and petty crime, drinking through what remains of his hope, until he wanders into a socialist political meeting almost by accident and hears, for the first time, an explanation for his ruin that does not blame him for it. The novel ends with Jurgis converted, newly employed at a socialist run hotel, and giving himself over to the cause with the same intensity he once gave to surviving.
Sinclair meant every page of it as an argument for socialism on behalf of exploited industrial workers, and he builds that argument through the specific machinery of the stockyards, adulterated sausage, diseased cattle passed as healthy, workers who fall into rendering vats and are ground into lard along with everything else. It reads fast and plainly, closer to reportage than to a shaped novel, and the horror of its factory floor detail can overwhelm the political argument Sinclair actually wanted readers to take from it.
Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover at the Chicago stockyards in 1904 gathering material, and five publishers turned the finished manuscript down as too shocking before Doubleday, Page and Company finally took it.
Historical Context & Significance
No literary prize recognized the book in 1906, since the Pulitzer for fiction did not exist until 1918. The Jungle first ran serialized in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason through 1905 before Doubleday published it as a book on February 28, 1906, selling 25,000 copies within six weeks. President Theodore Roosevelt had dismissed Sinclair as a crank before reading an advance copy, then sent investigators to confirm the plant conditions, even while privately doubting three fourths of what Sinclair had written was literally true.
The public response was legislative rather than literary. Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act within the year, laws that eventually grew into the modern FDA. Sinclair himself later said he had aimed for the public's heart and hit its stomach instead, disappointed that readers cared more about contaminated meat than about the workers he had written the book to defend.