Novel
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair · 1906
Synopsis
Jurgis Rudkus and Ona, young Lithuanians, have come to Chicago with their family, a dozen people in all, and celebrate their wedding in the back room of a saloon, behind the stockyards. Jurgis, hired at Brown's, sweeps entrails in the slaughter room. The family buys a house whose terms it has not understood, and discovers interest charges it did not expect. Winter comes: the frost, the accidents, the foremen who must be paid, the spoiled meat that is treated and resold, the workers fallen into the vats.
Context
The socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason advances him five hundred dollars; he spends seven weeks of 1904 in the Chicago slaughterhouses, a lunch pail in hand to pass for a worker. The text appears as a serial in this newspaper from February to November 1905, then, after several publishers refused it, as a volume from Doubleday, Page in 1906. Sinclair wanted to win his readers over to socialism; they remembered only the meat. He sends a copy to President Roosevelt, who orders an investigation, and two federal laws, on meat inspection and on food, are signed on 30 June 1906. Sinclair says he aimed at the public's heart and hit it in the stomach.
Who it is for
A long novel, with harrowing slaughterhouse scenes, written to convince as much as to tell a story. Recent translation by Anne Jayez and Gérard Dallez.
Prizes and reception
Twenty-five thousand copies in six weeks, translations into seventeen languages within a few months; never out of print since.
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