Modern
Read this if you…
- want a book that depicts real, horrible conditions of poor immigrants
- care about books that actually caused crazy changes in laws (working conditions, FDA)
- are into socialism/politics
Skip this if you…
- dislike books with heavy political agenda
- don't want to hear about the pain of poor people for an entire book
The 
Take
Super well done, especially the beginning . Paints a picture of the horrific early factory conditions in Chicago and the burgeoning labor union/socialism movement. The end get super overtly political which I get, but just took away from just getting into the narrative.Still excellently writtenFeels like Steinbeck used a lot of similar themes
Connections
The lineage through The Jungle
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Jungle built on it. - *The Jungle* was conceived as a sequel by analogy — Sinclair wanted to do for the wage slave what Stowe had done for the enslaved - Stowe proved a novel could move a nation to outrage and policy; Sinclair simply pointed the same weapon at the meatpacking floor - Read *Uncle Tom's Cabin* first and the ambition behind *The Jungle* snaps into focus — it's working a form Stowe perfected
- The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. The Jungle built on it. - *The Jungle* is a journey through hell, and Sinclair says so in Dante's own name - He invokes Dante twice inside the novel — the peasants who declared the poet "had been into hell" — to frame Packingtown's horror against the *Comedy* - Reading Dante first sharpens what Sinclair is doing: Jurgis's descent through the stockyards is structured like a passage through the circles of the damned
- The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. The Jungle built on it. - *The Jungle* is the *Communist Manifesto* staged as fiction — Sinclair absorbed Marx on his 1902 conversion and built the novel toward an explicit socialist polemic - Read Marx first and Jurgis's ruin reads as the thesis in human form: the worker as proletarian, capital as the machine that consumes him - Written for the socialist paper *Appeal to Reason*, the book closes not on plot but on doctrine — the *Manifesto*'s argument, delivered from a soapbox
Editions
Recommended Editions
#1Top Pick$22.00$20.50
Penguin Classics
2006
Gottesman's Penguin prints the full 1906 text with a strong contextualizing introduction. The book's socialist closing chapters are where the argument actually lands, and any abridgment that cuts them is missing the point.
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Notable Quotes
I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
AcclaimPraised by 4 notable voices
- Winston Churchill, British statesman, later Nobel laureate in Literature, 1874–1965: "It pierces the thickest skull and most leathery heart."
- Jack London, American novelist, 1876–1916: "It is alive and warm. It is brutal with life. It is written of sweat and blood."
- Arthur Conan Doyle, British novelist, creator of Sherlock Holmes, 1859–1930: "I look upon Upton Sinclair as one of the greatest novelists in the world, the Zola of America."
- Ralph Nader, consumer protection activist, author of Unsafe at Any Speed, 1934–: Read it as a boy "trembling with excitement"; called the 1967 meeting with the frail, wheelchair-bound Sinclair a passing of the torch.