Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Karsten Piep (Union University)

Ed. by Nick Selby, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Atasoy Emrah (University of Warwick), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1906

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Pronounced “the

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

of wage slavery” by Jack London, Upton Beall Sinclair’s bestselling

The Jungle

ranks among the most influential and enduring pieces of American social protest fiction. Adapting the journalistic approach of earlier muckraking exposés such as Jacob Riis’s

How the Other Half Lives

(1890) and Lincoln Steffens’s

The Shame of the Cities

(1904),

The Jungle

traces the inevitable demise of Jurgis Rudkus and his family – poor Lithuanian immigrants whose American Dream is viciously crushed by the predatory capitalist environment of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Shifting from a documentary style to blunt didacticism, the last third of the novel chronicles the rebirth of Jurgis as a proletarian hero, who finds salvation in socialism.

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2713 words

Citation: Piep, Karsten. "The Jungle". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 January 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=458, accessed 16 May 2024.]

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