The Jungle: A Novel

Upton Sinclair

Dec 2015 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

The classic protest novel that exposed harsh working conditions and unsanitary practices in the meatpacking industry

A slaughterhouse worker from Lithuania, Jurgis Rudkus immigrated to turn-of-the-century Chicago believing that he would find freedom and prosperity. Instead, meager wages and a filthy, dangerous workplace drive him deep into debt and despair. Victimized, abused, and utterly alone, Jurgis and his wife, Ona, face a lifetime of never-ending struggle in a merciless urban jungle.
 
An extraordinary work of fiction based in cold, hard fact, The Jungle is one of the most influential novels ever written. Privately published in 1906, it quickly became an international bestseller, inspiring sweeping and essential changes, including the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Powerful and provocative, poignant and horrifying, The Jungle is Upton Sinclair’s masterwork.
 
This ebook has been authorized by the estate of Upton Sinclair.

Ratings and reviews

Jurgis's life story reveals the plight of immigrant workers and the practices of the meat packing industry in the early 1900s. It's a genuine eye-opener. No wonder so much legislation followed on the heals of punishment of this book. However, the political agenda of the book's ending somewhat spoiled it for me.

The way the animals are treated in the meat industry is eye opening even though it was not the point of the book. It seems like very few things has changed.

disturbing, heartwrenching, remarkably descriptive and continualy relevant in a world where people work just to exist.

About the author

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state’s ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism; and the eleven novels in the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lanny Budd series.