Book Bearings
The Jungle
- 350 pages · about 6 hours
- First published 1905
- 673 editions
- Free to read
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
Jurgis Rudkus, a young Lithuanian, has come to Chicago with his bride, Ona, and their extended family, believing that America offers freedom and better wages. They find work in the stockyards and meatpacking plants, and are cheated and worn down by them. Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks gathering material in Chicago's meatpacking district in 1904, and wrote the novel to show the poverty and danger in which immigrant workers lived and the corruption of those with power over them. It appeared as a serial in a socialist newspaper in 1905 and as a book in 1906, and what it showed of the meat industry caused a public uproar.
- Sociology
- Historical fiction
- Emigration and immigration
- Classics
- Political corruption
- Immigrants
- Corruption
- Politics
2 What to expect
A protest novel about a Lithuanian immigrant family ground down by work in Chicago's meatpacking plants in the early 1900s. One misfortune follows another, relentlessly, alongside notorious descriptions of filthy and dangerous conditions in the plants. It is powerful and grim, more journalism and argument than subtle fiction, and it closes as a case for socialism.
Good for readers who want: social protest fiction, immigrant life in industrial America, and a powerful read.
3 Read it free, right here
A free scan from the Internet Archive opens right here on the page, with no sign-up.
Read it on the Internet Archive4 About Upton Sinclair
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5 Similar books
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
- A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
- O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
- Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie