The Jungle, Upton Sinclair - Louise Carroll Wade (essay date fall 1991)
Louise Carroll Wade (essay date fall 1991)
SOURCE: Wade, Louise Carroll. “The Problem with Classroom Use of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.” American Studies 32, no. 2 (fall 1991): 79-101.
[In the following essay, Wade exposes evidence of Sinclair's misleading portrait of the area he called “Packingtown” in The Jungle, claiming that Sinclair overlooked many social and cultural facts.]
There is no doubt that The Jungle helped shape American political history. Sinclair wrote it to call attention to the plight of Chicago packinghouse workers who had just lost a strike against the Beef Trust. The novel appeared in February 1906, was shrewdly promoted by both author and publisher, and quickly became a best seller. Its socialist message, however, was lost in the uproar over the relatively brief but nauseatingly graphic descriptions of packinghouse “crimes” and “swindles.”1 The public's visceral...
[The entire page is 11969 words long]
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