The Jungle

Upton Sinclair's story exposed the conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into focus the odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled. This book was championed by the then president Theodore Roosevelt, and was a catalyst to the passing of the Pure Food and Meat Inspection act.

“Practically alone among the American writers of his generation, [Sinclair] put to the American public the fundamental questions raised by capitalism in such a way that they could not escape them.” —Edmund Wilson

When it was first published in 1906, The Jungle exposed the inhumane conditions of Chicago’s stockyards and the laborer’s struggle against industry and “wage slavery.” It was an immediate bestseller and led to new regulations that forever changed workers’ rights and the meatpacking industry. A direct descendant of Dickens’s Hard Times, it remains the most influential workingman’s novel in American literature.

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