The Jungle

Upton Bell Sinclair Jr. was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore. Later, he

moved to New York and supported himself writing pulp fiction. In 1901, he privately

published his first novel, Springtime and Harvest (later named King Midas). The Jungle,

was Upton Sinclair’s sixth novel and first commercially successful work and with part of

his proceeds he founded a Socialist cooperative in Englewood, New Jersey. Sinclair

wrote many novels after The Jungle, such as King Coal, Oil, and Boston. He received the

Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1943, for Dragon’s Teeth, a anti-fascist novel on Nazism in

Germany. Sinclair died on November 15, 1968 at the age of ninety. Sinclair has been

widely published and translated throughout the world, with some 90 published books in

The Jungle was written to expose the filthy manufacturing practices of the packers

who used rotten, diseased, and contaminated meat. It was also written to tell how

Socialism was an answer to the problems of Capitalism.

The story starts out as a young immigrant Lithuanian couple, Jurgis Rudkus a

. . .
So far this whole book has been very depressing

Jurgis has trouble finding a job again, but finally gets a good one at a steel mill

(don’t be fooled that things are starting to look better). Such as, the packers

gather and clean the animals hairs and fat from the banks of Bubbly Creek, an arm of the

Chicago river that runs along the yards and into which enormous quantities of chemicals

and waste matter are poured. This probably is

because Sinclair wanted simple and uneducated people to understand his writing. After that Stanislovas’ fingers freeze in a snowstorm. He makes you feel like you are really in the wretched

slaughtering plants or breathing in the filthy Packingtown air. Then, when he returns to work his

ankle still hurts and they learn it wasn’t a sprain, but a twisted tendon and he has to spend

another two months in bed. Being the hot head that he is, Jurgis goes

down to the factory and opens up a can of whoop-ass on this guy.

When he finally returns home from jail he sees his house has been painted and fixed up. Though all is not that bad, Jurgis gets involved with union activity and starts

learning English. Jurgis and Duane become partners and commit many

crimes, like robbery and fraud. They then go to

Brown’s beef packing plant, where the animals are killed and prepared in an assembly

line fashion. Of course, he just

screwed his family even more because he went to jail and he can’t work to support them.

The second chapter is where the story actually starts. All of the members of the family also face

problems at work, like Stanislovas who is afraid to go to work after he sees a boy’s ear

break off.

Common topics in this essay:
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Approximate Word count = 1675
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

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