...Muckraker journalist, Upton Sinclair, in his flawed novel The Jungle exposes the corruption and ethical issues of industries in the early 1990’s. He uses vivid imagery to describe the political and ethical corruption that his characters face . He then rapidly moves the plot along, leaving little time to adequately develop his characters. Sinclair attempts to expose the false reality of the American Dream in order to reform a corrupt industry. Upton Sinclair uses vivid description to show readers the corruption of Chicago and its stockyards. Chicago is a filthy city full of grime, death and struggling families. The streets are“mud” playgrounds deep enough to drown small children. Garbage, people, and disease cover the roads and sidewalks....
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...reacting to problems that were caused by the massive growth of immigrants into large cities. Progressives, at first, concentrated on improving the lives of people and immigrants living in the poorest areas, and then on getting rid of corruption in government. (Constitutional Rights Foundation) Journalists of this time took advantage of the opportunity to show the American people how corrupt many of the health systems were. In 1902, magazine publishers discovered that their sales increased dramatically when they highlighted popular stories of political corruption, corporate misconduct, or other offenses. (Gilder Lehrman Institute) The novelist Upton Sinclair also played a large role during this new era in the fight...
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...Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle Upton Sinclair wrote his book The Jungle in 1906. This book was a huge success. Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland. Sinclair grew up poor with his mother and father. His mother sent him to his richer family on his mother's side. He started to write children’s stories and humor pieces in magazines at age 14. He also he started writing stories at age 16. At 18, he graduated from New York City University. After the success of The Jungle, Sinclair started to write more books with a political message. To write the book, The Jungle, Sinclair had to go undercover at a meat packing factory and expose how the industry had mistreated workers and had unsanitary conditions. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, is the book that he is most known for because it was able to change the law, it fit into a popular kind of writing called muckraking, and his political views were different from most peoples’ in America....
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...Impacts of The Jungle on American Society As Judith Lewis Herman exhorted in her novel, Trauma and Recovery, "The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness” (“Trauma and Recovery Quotes”). However, a nationwide nerve was struck when the grotesque meat- packing industry was revealed by Upton Sinclair. He blazoned to Americans across the country the lurid details of the industry though his novel, The Jungle, a novel which changed American history. [This scathing review on the meat packing industry with socialist undertones brought an advent of great social and legal change to the United States.] With its stunning entrance into American literature in 1906, The Jungle created an uproar that has endured over a century since its publication. Upton Sinclair was an ardent proponent of socialism in America and yearned to reform the ailing country (Fogel). His novel was produced as a metaphor, comparing a jungle directly to the corrupt meat packing industry based in Chicago. Sinclair sought to expose the unknown atrocities hidden in the meat packing industry, which was not forced to obey any form of regulation (Shafer). Sinclair wrote that, “It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory” (Sinclair 56). This fictional piece of literature brought America to a screeching halt. Never before had such a bold statement been made about an industry that affected almost every single American. Upton’s...
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...In 1906, Upton Sinclair's Book The Jungle was published in book form; it had previously been published as a newspaper serial in 1905. Few works of literature have changed history in the United States so much as The Jungle did when it was published. Does Sinclair Lewis make a compelling argument for socialism in his book, The Jungle? I think that the answer to this question is going to be dependent on what you end up believing about socialism. A die hard socialist is probably going to point to Sinclair's ending with zeal and passion because it proves that Jurgis could only find a home when renouncing capitalism and its perverse interpretation of the American Dream. I think that Sinclair believed in the socialist ending of his novel. Yet, I want to pivot the question a bit. While the socialist claim might not be persuasive, like Marx himself, Sinclair is probably more eloquent on suggesting that the current capitalist system, the one being written about at the turn of the century, is in desperate need of repair. His persuasion might lie in his critique of capitalism more than his embrace of socialism. “The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, exposed the nauseating conditions of Chicago’s meat packing industry.” (Goldfield, David R. The American Journey: A History of the United States.) He couldn't have been very happy that the book gained fame for a different reason, but nonetheless it did gain a significant amount of fame and get that message of socialism is better than communism...
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...On February 26, 1906, Upton Sinclair released The Jungle, a novel written about the life of a Lithuanian family moving to America and the hardships they faced there. Sinclair, a Socialist and a muckraker reporter wrote the novel in hopes of gaining supporters of the Socialist party. What he ended up doing was single handily cause the formation of the Food and Drug Administration after he showed the nation what was really happening with their food. Yet looking at the work as what it’s meant to be, an exposure of the negative effects of a capitalist society on the impoverished citizens, was Sinclair’s indictment a fair assessment. The novel The Jungle, follows the story of Jurgis Rudkus and his new family as they move to America in search of...
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...and uneducated and were likely considered peasants in their own countries. Jurgis Rudkus, a fictionalized character in Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle is an example of such a person. Jurgis is from Lithuania and comes to America in search of the American dream. At the beginning of the novel Jurgis comes to America as any other typical European immigrant. He dreams of America as being a land where a man with little can rise through the ranks and ultimately become a man with wealth and prosperity. Jurgis quickly realizes that industrial America is a land of heartache, where a willing man is exploited and used as energy to fuel the never ending industrial machine. At the end of the novel Jurgis learns that the great land of America has its limitations, but at a cost as he loses his wife and child and spends stints in jail for trying to defy the machine. Thus, the novel, The Jungle exemplifies how immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s could not fully realize and achieve the American dream no matter how hard they toiled and worked in the brutal American factories of the time. A jungle is an area of madness and chaos where animals roam free and one either eats or is eaten. Upton Sinclair titled his novel, The Jungle because urban Chicago exemplified all of the same traits that a jungle possessed except for the fact that the jungle of...
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...paved with gold, rather they were welcomed by streets paved with trash and the air filled with smoke and pungent odors, as presented in the book The Jungle. The Jungle is a novel written by Upton Sinclair that displayed the severe working and living conditions that immigrants were forced to deal with. Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tensions and historical processes in hand in the late 19th, early 20th century showing us factory conditions, housing conditions, and political corruption through the eyes of an immigrant family. Writing the novel through the eyes of the family allows readers to feel sympathetic towards the family, and is why this book was so effective in bringing attention to the circumstances that the lower class was put in. The Jungle is about an immigrant family from Lithuania who came to the United States being promised a better life, however as soon as...
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...which we the reader have not endured ourselves. His most notable work was The Jungle in which he exposed the American public to the inhumane and hazardous conditions of the meat packing industry and the injustices faced by immigrants. Upton Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland to an alcoholic father whom he was named after and his...
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...Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, attempts to portray the corruption within capitalism in virtue of the American Dream. Due to Sinclair’s earlier years of childhood, he was together exposed to poverty as well as the upper-class. In result of being raised by an alcohol salesman and puritan mother, he could understand the glimpses of the upper-class lifestyle that were received from his mother’s wealthy family. Sinclair was very knowledgeable from a young age, thus leading him to college studying journalism in hopes of becoming a novelist. Though many of his books failed, Sinclair continued on to write a best-selling novel that changed the outlook on society. Originally, The Jungle was not accepted into newspapers as he wished, but was released...
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...Whenever you hear "The Jungle" most think of a tropical forest full of thick, brightly colored plants and trees containing various types of animals. However, the book The Jungle is a novel written by the American journalist and muckraker Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel to expose the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the meatpacking industry of Chicago. So how do the two relate? The novel's title symbolizes the competitive nature of capitalism. The life of living in Packingtown is like living in a jungle, in which the strong prey on the weak and all living things are engaged in a violent, brutal fight for survival. In the book, you only see the use of the word "jungle" once. This being when Jurgis has been drinking and decides to sleep with a prostitute. The novel also seems to compare Jurgis' sexual desire to that of a beast in the jungle. Therefore associating jungles with uncontrolled desires. This being said, the awful conditions of the workers in Packingtown are the result of the uncontrollable human desire for money. The Jungle is about bringing to light human greed and the social damage it does. The images of "beasts" that live in the jungle also depicts violence and brutality – another huge theme of Sinclair's analysis of life in Packingtown. Sinclair describes capitalism as destructive because he shows it...
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...experienced a dramatic expansion in wealth and prosperity. However, with the Wall Street Crash in 1929 the U.S.A. experienced an economic depression that destroyed millions of livelihoods. This eventful period of American history led many to question the American Dreams place in modern America. This research paper will examine the interpretation of the American Dream in literature between the Progressive Era at the start of the twentieth century and the 1950s economic and social boom. In order to do this the paper will examine the novels The Jungle, The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman. These three novels all examine the American Dream in different decades. Written in 1906 by Upton Sinclair The Jungle is a novel that portrayed the life of immigrants and the working class in early-twentieth century America. The novel was published during the muckraking decade and its depiction of poverty, unpleasant living and working conditions and the corruption of those in power led it to be called “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery.” A socialist Sinclair believed that by the start of the twentieth...
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...In The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, the author depicts the story of a young and hardworking man, Jurgis Rudkus, and his family’s struggles in the American economic system of the early twentieth century. Coming from Lithuania with the hopes of a better life, Jurgis’ family lands in Chicago with the pursuit to prosper in the new and exciting land. From the start, the family encounters trouble: scammers in both Lithuania and America deplete the family’s savings, the saloon-keeper at Jurgis and Ona’s wedding overprices them for the amount of alcohol guests have consumed, and the conditions of Packingtown are not what they expected. In the ensuing chapters, the family’s luck changes from bad to worse when a multitude of family members die and jobs are repeatedly taken away from many of the group. Sinclair demonstrates through the optimistic and naive Rudkus-Lukoszaite family that American capitalism is destructive to the common worker and the immigrant class. In the proclaimed “wage slavery,” Sinclair describes how the immigrant population was "dependent for its opportunities of life, upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers” (Sinclair 126). In Chicago, the immigrant...
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...Social Darwinism struck most of the United States’ larger cities, leaving the poor to starve in the streets. Upton Sinclair was a novelist muckraker, someone who reveals corruption within large companies, which led to the creation of one of the most famous activist novels. Sinclair’s The Jungle depicts the utterly disturbing life of an immigrant living in the meatpacking area of Chicago. In the novel, Sinclair graphically describes the working conditions of Jurgis and other poorly paid workers. They were shut in dark, cold working environments with slippery knives which often injured workers accompanied with infection, putting them on their backs for months at a time. Throughout the novel, Sinclair manifests fictional events that often occurred...
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...Andrew Middleton 2/23/15 History 100c The Jungle: Diluted Dreams From the 1880’s though the 1920’s, industries in America were steadily on the rise, followed diligently by its population. Immigrant’s traveled from across the world with a single shared fantasy in mind: that the wealthy and prosperous America, through its abundant opportunities, would provide them with a respectable form of employment and a presentable household for the upbringing of their families. The Jungle is a very distinct type of book that looks at various aspects of the past and modern day inter-workings of the American society. Witten by Upton Sinclair, his main purpose was to raise awareness of his anit-capitalism message by means of specific details and cunning symbolism. The arrangement of the novel depicts the corrupt capitalism in the years of the early 1900's. The book captures the dramatic changes occurring at the turn of the turn of the turn of the century. Its central focus is to portray the unspeakable working conditions in the meat-packing industry in many large cities and specifically in Chicago. Western America was known as the frontier because of its undeveloped landscape but Manifest Destiny was initiating industrial growth that was disperse throughout the country. All these job openings attracted thousands and thousands of immigrants into America and especially into the urban parts of major cities because most of them had no other means of bringing in money. They were unaware of the...
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