rs, doctors, saloon keepers -- anyone who knew anything about the corruption and working conditions in the packing houses. To better collect his evidence, he often penetrated the meat-packing plants disguised as a worker. In Packingtown he found his inspiration for both his setting and his protagonist for his novel, The Jungle. Sinclair modeled his protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, after a Lithuanian meat packer he met at a wedding feast. In 1906 Sinclair succeeded in having The Jungle published by Doubleday, Page, and Company, although many other publishers had rejected the book on the gr!
             ounds that the information it contained was questionable and exaggerated. Although Sinclair's original intention was to expose the moral outrage of wage slavery and advocate Socialism, his publisher advertised the novel as an uncovering of the many health violations of the meat packing industry However, this approach made The Jungle a bestseller and Sinclair a world famous writer (Rollyson 2954). As Sinclair said, "I aimed for the public's heart, and by accident, I hit it in the stomach" (Sinclair vi). This response increased drastically as the public became outraged. The U.S. Senate to passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, after President Theodore Roosevelt allegedly became sickened by reading Sinclair's account of conditions inside the meat-packing plants (Moss and Wilson 179). Ultimately, the impact of The Jungle was as a muckraking novel about unsanitary meat processing rather than a Socialist novel about wage slavery.
             In many instances, Sinclair depicts the lives of the workers of the meat packing industry through metaphorical animal imagery, which reflects the title of the book, and compares the workers to wild beasts struggling to stay alive in a savage jungle of competitive individualism. From very early in the novel he compares his characters to animals who are penned up and slaughtered every day in the stockyards...