Review
?When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime I do not refer them to the newspaper files and to the authorities, but to [Sinclair?s] novels.? ?George Bernard Shaw
Book Description
1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page.
Card catalog description
Describes the characteristics and location of different types of jungles and the people, plants, and animals that inhabit them.
From the Publisher
During his lifetime, Upton Sinclair authored dozens of books dealing with political and social questions, The Coal War and Oil! being two representative examples. Sinclair was also a socialist and political activist almost his entire adult life. After being massively outspent by business interests he narrowly missed being elected governor of California in 1936. The Jungle, written while he was still in his 20s, is by far his best known book.
The Jungle FROM OUR EDITORS
This muckraking novel changed the course of history with its gruesomely detailed picture of the meat-packing industry. Historically accurate & humanistic, the book remains an invaluable mirror by which we may still examine ourselves & society today.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Jungle's influence has been extraordinary for a literary work. Upton Sinclair's 1906 landmark novel is widely credited with awakening the public fury that led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), a watershed in consumer protection and government legislation. This story of the immigrant experience in the harrowing Chicago stockyards has drawn comment from historians, policymakers, and literary critics, and it is a widely assigned teaching text. The novel is accompanied by an introduction and explanatory annotations.
SYNOPSIS
In this powerful book we enter the world ofᄑᄑJurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian immigrant who arrivesᄑᄑin America fired with dreams of wealth, freedom,ᄑᄑand opportunity.
FROM THE CRITICS
New York Times Book Review
Mr. Sinclair in The Jungle has given the world a close, a striking, and, we may say, in many ways a brilliant study of the great industries of Chicago. . . . The language Mr. Sinclair employs is appropriate to the scene, the action, and the characters of his drama. . . . The experienced reader will at once perceive that Mr. Sinclair has taken Zola for his model. The likeness is more than striking -- it fairly forces itself upon the attention of the reader. . . .He has not written a second Uncle Tom's Cabin. -- New York Times review, March 1906; Books of the Century
Library Journal
The Jungle , published by Doubleday, Page in 1906, was originally serialized in the Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason , which asked Sinclair to investigate conditions in Chicago's meat-packing industry. Salvaged from the cellar of a farmhouse near Girard, Kansas, along with numerous letters and documents, including Sinclair's correspondence with the Appeal to Reason , the serialization is here reproduced with an introduction and an appendix detailing changes made in the Doubleday edition. Scholars will welcome this version of Sinclair's Socialist novel in its original form. For academic libraries. John Budd, Graduate Lib. Sch., Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
AudioFile - Paul B. Janeczko
Guidallᄑs passionate rendering of the text makes it possible to visualize the vicious and grotesque conditions inside the slaughterhouses in a way that reading text might not convey. J.K.R. ᄑAudioFile, Portland, Maine