The Jungle, Upton Sinclair - Eric Homberger (essay date 1986)
Eric Homberger (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: Homberger, Eric. “Upton Sinclair.” In American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39: Equivocal Commitments, pp. 34-58.New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986.
[In the following essay, Homberger analyzes The Jungle as Sinclair's first novel after his conversion to socialism.]
‘American literature today’, wrote Gertrude Atherton in 1904, ‘is the most timid, the most anaemic, the most lacking in individualities, the most bourgeois that any country has ever known.’1 A modestly successful and highly industrious lady scribbler, with over fifty books under her belt in a career which continued for a half-century from 1892, Mrs Atherton waved the banner of a high and serious art. She advised her contemporaries to abandon the snug and the conventional; writers must learn to ‘fight unceasingly’ for literature, and face the prospect of having ‘to stand absolutely alone’....
[The entire page is 11422 words long]
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