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The Jungle
Book

The Jungle

New York, 1906

Literary Classic

  • Documentary Literature
  • Realism

What It’s About

A Gut-Wrenching Tale of Degradation and Disillusionment

Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle shocked respectable Americans in 1906. Repeated economic crises punctuated rapidly growing industrial output, casting millions of people out of work and onto the streets. Conventional thinking was that these events were transient phenomena and that hard work and clean living would deliver individual prosperity in time. Many Americans saw slums, vice and squalor as signs of individual shortcomings – nothing more than new immigrants bringing bad habits and poor discipline with them from the old countries. The Jungle turned that way of thinking on its head. The economic system Sinclair portrayed took decent hard-working immigrants, stripped them of their savings, health, dignity and frequently their lives, in pursuit of shoddy, unsafe consumer products. It rewarded crime and political corruption, while crushing anyone foolish enough to demand fair treatment and a decent life. Unfortunately, Sinclair’s exposé of meat processing conditions in Chicago was the only part of his novel to truly upset respectable Americans’ stomachs. Food safety standards raised quickly, but improving working conditions would take decades longer. More than one hundred years on, the same questions of food quality and exploitation of the many for the benefit of a few once again resonate in debates on inequality, processed foods and pesticide residues.

Summary

From Lithuania to America

In the stockyards of Chicago, a lavish celebration according to old Lithuanian custom is taking place. Jurgis Rudkus can finally marry his beloved Ona Lukoszaite. Back in Lithuania, Jurgis used to live on a farm with his father Antanas. Then he met Ona. He asked the father for her hand, but was rejected, for Ona’s family was wealthy, and he himself didn’t have a lot to offer. When months later he tried again, he had more luck: Ona’s father had died, and the family had been forced to give up their farm. This is why they allowed Ona to marry, yet the girl didn’t want to leave her family, and so her brother Jonas suggested they emigrate to America together. With Ona’s stepmother Teta Elzbieta and her six children Stanislovas, Kotrina, Vilimas, Nikalojus, Juozapas, Kristoforas as well as Ona’s cousin Marija coming along, they set out as a party of twelve.

The family face poor treatment and lose money on their passage...

About the Author

Upton Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, a liquor salesman, was an alcoholic, his mother a strict Episcopalian who preached abstinence. He was an only child growing up in poverty, but his maternal grandparents were very wealthy. He often stayed with them, learning first-hand what it meant to be rich and poor. While despising his father’s addiction, he equally abhorred his mother’s puritanism. At age 14, he entered the City College of New York and later Columbia University, funding his education by writing dime novels and articles for pulp magazines. At age 22 he married Meta Fuller, who was three years his junior. She gave birth to their son David in 1901. Yet his married life was a mess, and the couple separated years later. After several unsuccessful attempts of writing serious literature, Sinclair spent several weeks working in Chicago slaughterhouses in 1904, gathering material for the muckraking novel The Jungle (1906). This proved to be his literary breakthrough, and he used half of the profits to found the socialist-utopian creative community – yet non-Jewish, white-only – Helicon Home Colony in New Jersey. The idea was to engage in communal cooking and cooperative care for children, but after just six months, the place burnt down to the ground. With his second wife Mary Craig Kimbrough he moved to California in the 1920s, where he ran unsuccessfully for several political offices on the socialist ticket. In 1927, he published the novel Oil! in the midst of the Great Depression. In 1934, Sinclair ran as a Democrat for the Californian governorship, on a platform called End Poverty in California (EPIC), but, after a venomous smear campaign against him, the incumbent defeated him. Six years later, with World’s End (1940) he started a successful series and won the Pulitzer Prize for the third volume Dragon’s Teeth (1942) in 1943. Prominent writers like George Bernard Shaw suggested him for the Nobel Prize in Literature due to his political activism. A prolific writer throughout his life – he had more than 100 works of fiction and non-fiction to his name – he died on November 25, 1968, at the ripe old age of 90 in New Jersey.


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