The Jungle

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

Cover Design or Artwork by Charles Burns
Foreword by Eric Schlosser
Introduction by Ronald Gottesman
Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then president Theodore Roosevelt, and was a major catalyst to the passing of the Pure Food and Meat Inspection act, which has tremendous impact to this day.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
“You don’t have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it,” wrote Upton Sinclair in 1962. He had spent his life doing just that through his writings and political activism. Born September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair began writing dime novels at the age of fifteen. By his death on November 25, 1968, he had completed more tan eighty books, twenty plays, and hundreds of articles dealing with virtually every social problem in the United States. He had helped establish the League for Industrial Democracy, gone to jail fighting for free speech a miner’s right, started the California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, and, almost won the governorship of that state by running on the platform “End Poverty in California.”

But Upton’s Sinclair’s fame rests on his muckraking novel The Jungle, a solidly research exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. The public furor that followed it publication in 1906 led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act later that year. Sinclair continued his attack on industrial evils and called for further reforms in The Metropolis (1908, The Moneychangers (1910), King Coal (1917, and Oil! (1927). His eleven-volume opus, Lanny Budd (1940-1953), dramatized world history from 1913 to1949. For the second novel in this series, Dragon’s Teeth (1942), he received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Throughout his life he remained a staunch Socialist and committed humanitarian, saying of his work “My efforts are to find out what is righteousness in the world, to live it, and try to help others to live it.” View titles by Upton Sinclair

About

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then president Theodore Roosevelt, and was a major catalyst to the passing of the Pure Food and Meat Inspection act, which has tremendous impact to this day.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Author

“You don’t have to be satisfied with America as you find it. You can change it,” wrote Upton Sinclair in 1962. He had spent his life doing just that through his writings and political activism. Born September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair began writing dime novels at the age of fifteen. By his death on November 25, 1968, he had completed more tan eighty books, twenty plays, and hundreds of articles dealing with virtually every social problem in the United States. He had helped establish the League for Industrial Democracy, gone to jail fighting for free speech a miner’s right, started the California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, and, almost won the governorship of that state by running on the platform “End Poverty in California.”

But Upton’s Sinclair’s fame rests on his muckraking novel The Jungle, a solidly research exposé of Chicago’s meatpacking industry. The public furor that followed it publication in 1906 led directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act later that year. Sinclair continued his attack on industrial evils and called for further reforms in The Metropolis (1908, The Moneychangers (1910), King Coal (1917, and Oil! (1927). His eleven-volume opus, Lanny Budd (1940-1953), dramatized world history from 1913 to1949. For the second novel in this series, Dragon’s Teeth (1942), he received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Throughout his life he remained a staunch Socialist and committed humanitarian, saying of his work “My efforts are to find out what is righteousness in the world, to live it, and try to help others to live it.” View titles by Upton Sinclair

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