The Jungle: (Annotated Edition)

The Jungle was published in 1906, three years after Upton Sinclair's failed first novel, and it became an immediate success. Sinclair based the novel on the American meatpacking industry, an industry that had received scrutiny in the decade before the novel's publication by journalists and social critics. For years before Sinclair began his work, these groups of writers and journalists had documented the abuses of the industry and the plight of immigrant workers who suffered under terrible working conditions. Sinclair's novel succeeded where others failed, however, not only because it captured the facts of living conditions in the stockyards of Chicago, but also because it made these facts real in people's imaginations.Sinclair began researching the novel in 1904. He told associates that his goal was to write the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Labor Movement. In the same way that Beecher Stowe's novel about the abuses of slavery catalyzed the abolitionist movement in the 1850's, so too did Sinclair hope to create a work of art that would turn public opinion and sentiment towards the thousands of immigrants and laborers who risked their lives in the unsafe working conditions of America's factories and manufacturing plants.Though the novel was a detailed expos� of the food industry in the early twentieth century, the meatpacking industry was arguably just a setting that Sinclair used to promote his own vision of socialist politics. Sinclair used the food industry because he believed it was an industry that touched the lives of all Americans. If people could become outraged at the process that brought meat to their tables, Sinclair assumed, their outrage would subsequently affect the working conditions of laborers. The villains of the novel are the giant meatpacking facilities, a thinly disguised version of real companies that had risen to prominence in the late nineteenth century. While much of America saw these companies, and their chief executives, as a marvel of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, Sinclair saw the enterprise as an example of capitalism's worst abuses.