Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

3 Pages 824 Words

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle published in 1906 is considered the novel that led to his “fame.” After writing more than one hundred plays and books and an extreme amount of articles Sinclair’s life is considered to be complete. Many of his books, articles, and plays dealt with a wide variety of social issues and Sinclair also assisted in creating the Leagues for Industrial Democracy. Sinclair is known for his strong socialistic beliefs and his journalistic style. The idea for The Jungle came about when the unsuccessful strike against the meatpacking companies in Chicago took place. Historically this time was horrible for immigrants and other poor families and was also a time of corruption and deceit.
The family that Sinclair has the reader follow is that of Jurgis Rudkus. An immigrant family from Lithuania the author describes their life story during the nineteen hundreds. During that time period the meatpacking factories were the only places an immigrant could find a job. Although the pay was not good some families would be able to survive with everyone working and the Rudkus family almost does.
Sinclair’s main character Jurgis is one of the men working in the slaughter yard at the meat house. He describes the horrors of working there with blood all over everyone all of the time and if a cow or pig would happen to get loose how they could trample anyone to death. “A time of peril on the killing beds was when a steer broke loose. Sometimes, in the haste of speeding-up, they would dump one of the animals out on the floor before it was fully stunned...in the wintertime it was enough to make your hair stand up, for the room would be so full of steam that you could not make out anything five feet in front of you” (114). This quote is just one of the examples of the dangers the men were in while working at the killing beds. Not only were there dangers at their job but in every section of the plant someone could get inj...