Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Karsten Piep (Union University)

Ed. by Nick Selby, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1906

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Pronounced “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery” by Jack London, Upton Beall Sinclair’s bestselling The Jungle ranks among the most influential and enduring pieces of American social protest fiction. Adapting the journalistic approach of earlier muckraking exposés such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities (1904), The Jungle traces the inevitable demise of Jurgis Rudkus and his family – poor Lithuanian immigrants whose American Dream is viciously crushed by the predatory capitalist environment of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Shifting from a documentary style to blunt didacticism, the last third of the novel chronicles the …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2713 words

Citation: Piep, Karsten. "The Jungle". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 January 2011 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=458, accessed 31 October 2024.]

Save this article