why is the jungle by upton sinclair called the jungle

The Jungle is about human greed and the social damage it does. The novel uses a jungle to symbolize unrestrained longing for something. From this perspective, it makes sense to name a novel about out-of-control lust for money using a symbol for hunger and desire.

Full Answer

When did Upton Sinclair write the jungle?

The Jungle, novel by Upton Sinclair, published serially in 1905 and as a single-volume book in 1906. The most famous, influential, and enduring of all muckraking novels, The Jungle was an exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards.

What is the history of the jungle?

See Article History. The Jungle, novel by Upton Sinclair, published serially in 1905 and as a single-volume book in 1906. The most famous, influential, and enduring of all muckraking novels, The Jungle was an exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards.

Who wrote the book The Jungle?

Written By: The Jungle, novel by Upton Sinclair, published serially in 1905 and as a single-volume book in 1906. The most famous, influential, and enduring of all muckraking novels, The Jungle was an exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards.

Why read ‘the jungle’?

Upton Sinclair conceived The Jungle as a political game-changer, a book that would get people talking and instigate major reforms. The book certainly did both of those things—but for reasons that its author didn’t quite expect. Grab a barf bag and join us as we take a fresh look at Sinclair’s gut-wrenching magnum opus. 1.

What does The Jungle symbolize in The Jungle?

The novel's title symbolizes the competitive nature of capitalism; the world of Packingtown is like a Darwinian jungle, in which the strong prey on the weak and all living things are engaged in a brutal, amoral fight for survival.

What is the message of The Jungle?

The main theme of The Jungle is the evil of capitalism. Every event, especially in the first twenty-seven chapters of the book, is chosen deliberately to portray a particular failure of capitalism, which is, in Sinclair's view, inhuman, destructive, unjust, brutal, and violent.

What inspired Sinclair to write The Jungle?

When Upton Sinclair set out to write his 1906 novel The Jungle, he was trying to bring attention to the dismal living and working conditions for immigrants working in the meatpacking industry. Instead, his novel inspired a national movement for food safety.

What are some themes in The Jungle?

The Jungle ThemesThe Dehumanizing Evils of Capitalism. The Jungle was written to demonstrate the evils of the capitalist system in America. ... The Immigrant Experience and Disillusionment. ... The Horrors of the Meatpacking Industry. ... Family, Masculinity, and Individualism. ... Labor Rights and Socialism.

Is The Jungle propaganda?

Although most critics regard The Jungle as propaganda, it differs from most propaganda novels whose authors readily concede bias. Sinclair considers his work more than just a means to an end; that is, he felt he was creating quality literature that simultaneously served as propaganda promoting socialism.

Why was The Jungle banned?

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair Burned in the Nazi bonfires because of Sinclair's socialist views (1933). Banned in East Germany (1956) as inimical to communism.

What law was passed because of The Jungle?

Within months, two pieces of legislation resulted from Sinclair's novel: The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both signed into law on June 30th, 1906. Sinclair was an instant celebrity and a Socialist hero, and was finally financially stable.

How did people react to The Jungle?

The public was outraged. The novel became a bestseller and has never gone out of print. Even the U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt showed concern. Although he questioned the publisher on their choice to reveal this information, laws were soon passed to improve the quality of food that made its way to consumers.

What is the conclusion of the Jungle Book?

At the end of Mowgli's story, Mowgli kills Shere Khan and ends up with a nice tiger suit that wouldn't look out of place at Fashion Week. At the end of Kotick's story, the white seal finds a safe beach for his seal friends, who are tired of clubbing.

What is the summary of Jungle Book?

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling is an adventure story about a man-cub named Mowgli. Mowgli is hunted by an evil tiger named Shere Khan. Mowgli tries to live a peaceful life with other humans, but is too wild for them and too human for the wolves. Eventually Mowgli finds a home in the jungle with a pack of his own.

What law was passed as a result of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle?

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce and laid a foundation for the nation's first consumer protection agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I have here . . . a number of adulterated articles.

How does The Jungle portray capitalism?

The Jungle portrays the many vices and injustices that result from capitalism, including horrific working conditions, child labor, political corruption, prostitution, drinking, cheating, and crime. Workers are exposed to brutal working conditions where they suffer exhaustion, injury, bodily harm, and death.

What is the Jungle by Upton Sinclair about?

Print (hardcover) Pages. 413. OCLC. 1150866071. The Jungle is a 1906 novel by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). The novel portrays the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities.

Who wrote the Jungle?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the novel by Upton Sinclair. For other uses, see Jungle (disambiguation). The Jungle is a 1906 novel by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). The novel portrays the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago ...

What is the chapter 9 of the Jungle about?

Chapter 9, of the Jungle, novel by Upton Sinclair, describing corruption in the Gilded Age. Jurgis Rudkus marries his fifteen-year-old sweetheart, Ona Lukoszaite, in a joyous traditional Lithuanian wedding feast.

Why did Upton Sinclair become famous?

Upton Sinclair intended to expose "the inferno of exploitation [of the typical American factory worker at the turn of the 20th Century ]", but the reading public fixed on food safety as the novel's most pressing issue. Sinclair admitted his celebrity arose "not because the public cared anything about the workers, but simply because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef".

Why did Roosevelt call Sinclair a crackpot?

President Theodore Roosevelt had described Sinclair as a "crackpot" because of the writer's socialist positions. He wrote privately to journalist William Allen White, expressing doubts about the accuracy of Sinclair's claims: "I have an utter contempt for him. He is hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful. Three-fourths of the things he said were absolute falsehoods. For some of the remainder there was only a basis of truth." After reading The Jungle, Roosevelt agreed with some of Sinclair's conclusions. The president wrote "radical action must be taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist." He assigned the Labor Commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds to go to Chicago to investigate some meat packing facilities.

Where does Jurgis return to in the fall?

In the fall, he returns to Chicago, sometimes employed, sometimes a tramp. While begging, he chances upon an eccentric rich drunk—the son of the owner of the first factory where Jurgis had worked—who entertains him for the night in his luxurious mansion and gives him a one-hundred-dollar bill.

What happened to Jurgis' father?

That winter, Jurgis's father, weakened by exposure to chemicals and the elements at his job, dies of illness.

Who is the main character in The Jungle?

The main plot of The Jungle follows Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, who came to the United States in the hope of living the American dream, and his extended family, which includes Ona, Jurgis’s wife; Elzbieta, Ona’s stepmother; Elzbieta’s six children; Marija, Ona’s cousin; and Dede Rudkus, Jurgis’s father.

When was the jungle published?

The Jungle, novel by Upton Sinclair, published serially in 1905 and as a single-volume book in 1906. The most famous, influential, and enduring of all muckraking novels, The Jungle was an exposé of conditions in the Chicago stockyards. Because of the public response, the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, ...

What happened to Jurgis in the book?

Jurgis encounters Phil Connor again and, in a fit of rage, attacks him. Jurgis is once again sent to prison. When he is released, he has no money and survives on charity. He finds Marija, who has become a prostitute in order to support Elzbieta and her remaining children. Marija has become addicted to morphine. Jurgis is eager to find a job before he goes to see Elzbieta. One night Jurgis wanders into a socialist political rally, where he is transformed. The novel ends with a hopeful chant of revolt: “Chicago will be ours.”

What is the savage nature of Packingtown?

The title of Sinclair’s novel describes the savage nature of Packingtown. Jurgis and his family, hoping for opportunity, are instead thrown into a chaotic world that requires them to constantly struggle in order to survive. Packingtown is an urban jungle: savage, unforgiving, and unrelenting.

Is the Jungle a true story?

The results were published serially until 1906, when Doubleday published The Jungle as a novel. To do research, Sinclair had gone undercover for seven weeks inside various Chicago meatpacking plants. The novel, while containing an abundance of true events, is fictional. Jurgis Rudkus and his family are not real people.

Where does Jurgis go to live?

Jurgis abandons the rest of the family and wanders the countryside for a while, returning to Chicago the next winter to live on his own. He finds a job digging freight tunnels, where he soon injures himself. When he recovers, he is unable to find a job and is forced to beg on the streets.

Is Jurgis Rudkus real?

Jurgis Rudkus and his family are not real people. Rather, their story is an amalgamation of stories Sinclair was exposed to. He utilized the fictional immigrant family as a vehicle for nonfictional anecdotes. When The Jungle was published, its readers were outraged—but not in the way Sinclair had hoped.

What happened to the jungle?

It didn’t take long for The Jungle to trigger a massive public outcry . Readers were sickened by the book’s revolting asides about the unsanitary conditions at meatpacking factories, which had huge consequences for America’s food industry—according to one packer who testified before Congress, sales of U.S. meats went down by 50 percent after Sinclair’s book was published in 1906. (For the record, though, this statement is unprovable because national statistics on meat consumption did not yet exist.)

How much did Sinclair make from the jungle?

Ultimately, The Jungle made Sinclair $30,000 richer. He bought Helicon Hall, an abandoned boy’s school in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1906. The Helicon Home Colony was “open to any white person of good moral character,” according to its application.

What was the Jungle book about?

Upton Sinclair conceived The Jungle as a political game-changer, a book that would get people talking and instigate major reforms. The book certainly did both of those things—but for reasons that its author didn’t quite expect. Grab a barf bag and join us as we take a fresh look at Sinclair’s gut-wrenching magnum opus.

How many volumes of The Jungle are there?

At one point, he approached Macmillan with a proposal to split the book into two volumes, with the first installment ending after the death of Ona—Jurgis’s wife—in Chapter 19. Sinclair hoped that this would buy him more time to cook up a conclusion for The Jungle, but Macmillan nixed the whole two-volume idea. So, with some help from Warren, Sinclair sat down and gave the novel its underwhelming finale. Five years later, an embittered Sinclair told one correspondent, “Think of my having had to ruin The Jungle with an ending so pitifully inadequate.”

What year did the Jungle come out?

A fire burned down Helicon Hall in 1907, putting an end to Sinclair’s strange communal experiment. 10. A silent film version of The Jungle came out in 1914. Produced by the All-Star Feature Corporation, this silent movie premiered in New York City on June 1, 1914.

What was the name of the book that Sinclair wrote about the Civil War?

Its editor, Fred D. Warren, admired Sinclair’s fourth novel, Manassas , a historical epic set in the Civil War that was written as a salute to the abolitionist movement.

Where did Upton Sinclair work?

Sinclair spent a total of seven weeks taking field notes in and around Chicago’s meatpacking district. To access local factories, he contacted Windy City socialists and union leaders, many of whom were familiar with his work in Appeal to Reason. In the 1975 book Upton Sinclair, American Rebel, biographer Leon Harris wrote that the men “took him into their homes and all over the slaughterhouses, where he proved he was a superb reporter.” Disguised in well-worn clothes, Sinclair blended right in. On top of checking out the stockyards, he also took a few peeks into Chicago’s big banks and the famous Jane Addams Hull House.

What is the Jungle by Upton Sinclair?

On the anniversary of its publication, get the facts on Upton Sinclair’s muckraking masterpiece. Upton Sinclair c.1906. 1. “The Jungle” is a work of fiction. Sinclair is arguably the best known of the so-called muckrakers, the forerunners of today’s investigative journalists who in the early 1900s exposed widespread corporate ...

What is the story of the jungle?

“The Jungle” tells the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in Chicago’s meatpacking district determined to live out the American dream. At first, his solution to everything is to work harder. Yet the system eventually beats him down. Among other calamities, he is laid off after being injured on the job, his wife is raped and then dies in childbirth, he is jailed, his house is repossessed and his young son drowns in the street. Only after becoming a socialist does Rudkus turn his life around.

What did Sinclair believe about the Rudkus family?

By depicting the trials and tribulations of the Rudkus family, Sinclair hoped to bring attention to the plight of immigrant laborers, whose working conditions, he believed, amounted to “wage slavery.”.

How many languages has The Jungle been translated into?

Luckily for him, “The Jungle” put a quick end to this period of anonymity. Within months, it had been translated into 17 languages and had attracted the attention of prominent figures around the world, such as Winston Churchill, who praised Sinclair for making the “great Beef Trust stink in the nostrils of the world.”.

Who read the Jungle?

President Roosevelt also read it, after which he invited Sinclair to the White House. (The two men, it turned out, did not get along particularly well.) Although “The Jungle” represented the pinnacle of his career, Sinclair was no one-hit wonder.

Was Sinclair a socialist?

2. “The Jungle” initially appeared in a socialist newspaper. Sinclair embraced socialism wholeheartedly within months of being introduced to it, and, except for a brief interlude during World War I, he would remain a committed member of the Socialist Party of America for decades thereafter.

What is the jungle about?

It's about the crushing brutality of capitalism, and the problems of unregulated accumulation of wealth.

Who wrote the book The Jungle?

Shelves: philosophy, novels, 20th-century, united-states. The jungle, Upton Sinclair. The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities.

What was the purpose of Upton Sinclair's book Uncle Tom's Cabin of Wage Slavery?

An avowed and proud socialist, his aim was to raise public awareness of the terrible conditions of the working poor —to write the " Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery,” as Jack London called the book. The book did cause a lot of outrage, but not for the intended reasons. The public interpreted the book as an exposé on the unsanitary conditions in the meat factories; and the legislation that resulted was purely to remedy this problem. As Sinclair himself said, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” This is one of those ironies of history that make you want to laugh or cry: a book aimed to publicize the plight of the working poor made an impact solely in the way that working conditions affected the middle class.

Where did Jurgis work in the slaughterhouses?

Shelves: scathing, le-travail-au-20e, urban-literature. The story of Jurgis and his family who came from Lithuania to work in the slaughterhouses of Chicago in the early 20th century. Doing some preparatory research for his novel, writer Upton Sinclair has spent some time as a worker in Packingtown, Chicago .

When was the first Upton Sinclair book published?

When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial edition edited out much of the ethnic flavor of the original, as well as some o. For nearly a century, the original version of Upton Sinclair's classic novel has ...

Which unmentioned act was pushed through Congress with the help of this book?

Denise The other unmentioned act that was pushed through Congress with the help of this book was the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.

When was the Jungle published?

For nearly a century, the original version of Upton Sinclair's classic novel has remained almost entirely unknown. When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial edition edited out much ...

What is the jungle about?

Understanding Jurgis and company for what they were rhetorically — relatively inessential coloring — The Jungle became a potent series of magazine stories about different Chicago institutions: the stockyards, the real estate agents, the factories, the apartments, the jails and courts, the brothels, the political operators.

What is the name of the river that was used as a dump by the stockyards?

Here’s a passage about Bubbly Creek, a horridly polluted stretch of the Chicago River that was used as a dump by the stockyards: Bubbles of carbonic acid gas will rise to the surface and burst, and make rings two or three feet wide.

What would happen if Jurgis had known what a woman was like?

Women, those poor creatures, are almost always in the way. “If he, Jurgis, had known what a woman was like, he would have had his eyes torn out first,” he thinks. When he makes a brief escape from the city and works on a nearby farm, his descent into a brothel is presented as a kind of moral torment.

Is Jurgis a polemic?

It is a punishingly blunt polemic. The novel follows the largely unlucky life of Jurgis, a Lithuanian immigrant who witnesses the horrors of the stockyard killing floors, the rapaciousness of bosses and real estate agents in league with corrupt judges, policemen, and authority figures. Every character, including Jurgis, is constructed of the cheapest cardboard. Every boss is a cheat, every bartender a sinister death-dealer, every cop a machine thug clutching you by the neck.

Was Sinclair a starry-eyed idealist about using fiction to transform society?

Was Sinclair being a starry-eyed idealist about using fiction to transform society? Sure. But culturally we’ve been all but hard-headedly absolutist in reject ing the notion. Along with the social novel, the novel of politics has disappeared too; we tell stories about society and politics through social-media memes, and what few in-depth reported pieces can get financed. The Jungle was one of the last gasps of the post-Dickens muckraking novel; fine novels about disaffection, loss, and interiority have replaced it, but it doesn’t quite seem like a fair trade. The tone and form of The Jungle are antiquated, but the story Sinclair wanted to tell isn’t.

Overview

Plot summary

Characters

Publication history

Reception

Adaptations

See also

Further reading