"The Jungle is perhaps the most brutal novel ever written in America. It is one long scream of pain and tragedy" (Cook 117). The novel shows the reader how hard being an immigrant was in the early 1900s. Immigrants had to take any job they could, even if that meant working in the packing plants, which Upton Sinclair shows in the novel. Jurgis Radix is the main character. Jurgis and his family move to America searching for a better life. Jurgis works in a packing plant and is continuously loosing his job. Halfway through the book, Jurgis' wife dies trying to give birth. The rest of the novel shows the reader Jurgis's hardships with his jobs and life. The novel, The Jungle depicts the horrors of meatpacking in the early 1900's, and helps push the government for stronger sanitation laws.
             The conditions in the meatpacking plants were so terrible that several men would died on the job. The things that were in the meat that the public ate were so revolting that Sinclair found it a need to write about it. Sausage meat would be shipped to Europe and be rejected and sent back to the U.S. By the time it reached the U.S., the sausage would be moldy and white, and then it would be "dosed with borax and glycerin, dumped into hoppers, and then made over again for public consumption " (Grall 1).
             Rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them, then they would die, and then the rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. The meat then would be shoveled into carts and the man doing the shoveling would not trouble to lift out even one rat if he saw it. "There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit" (Aryes 2). Hundreds of tons of meat would be stored in huge piles in rooms, and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it. Thousands of rats would race about on it. "It was too dark in the...