The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
eBook
(Xist Classics, July 14, 2014)
“Into this wild-beast tangle these men had been born without their consent, they had taken part in it because they could not help it; that they were in jail was no disgrace to them, for the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded. They were swindlers and thieves of pennies and dimes, and they had been trapped and put out of the way by the swindlers and thieves of millions of dollars.”The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 satire depicting the working conditions of life in the Chicago stockyards is one of the most controversial novels ever written. It depicts with vivid and brutal realism the experiences of a Slavic immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, and his wife, Ona. The Jungle tells of their rapid and inexorable descent into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and social and economic despair. Vulnerable and isolated, the family of Jurgis Rudkus struggles — unsuccessfully — to survive in an urban jungle.In a contemporary review author Jack London declared The Jungle to be, "The Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery."A film version of the novel was made in 1914, but it has since become lost.