In the Library
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair, 1906
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 11 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 31
- Length
- Length 149k words
£1.99
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In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
They use everything about the hog except the squeal.
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About the book
The wedding feast for Jurgis and Ona Rudkus runs long into the night on borrowed money, veselija tradition demanding a full keg and a full table as the guests who owe them favors slip out the door unpaid. It is the last unclouded happiness either of them will have. Upton Sinclair follows this Lithuanian family from that feast into the Chicago stockyards, where unending shifts on the killing floor pay just enough to starve slowly: rotten meat rubbed with soda and sold anyway, dead rats swept into the sausage grinder with the trimmings, a man who slips into a rendering vat and is sold, in time, as lard. Sinclair meant to make readers weep for the workers ground up alongside the meat; instead the nation recoiled at what it was eating, and within months Congress had passed the laws that govern the food on your table. The novel's real horror was never the sausage. It was Jurgis, breaking piece by piece under a system built to use him up and call it industry, until only his anger is left whole.