The Jungle: An Authoritative Text, Contexts and Backgrounds, Criticism

Front Cover
Norton, 2003 - Fiction - 526 pages
This story of the immigrant experience in the harrowing Chicago stockyards has drawn comment from historians, policymakers, and literary critics, and it is a widely assigned teaching text. The novel is accompanied by an introduction and explanatory annotations.

"Contexts and Backgrounds" provides readers with an understanding of The Jungle's disparate social, historical, political, and literary dimensions. Included are autobiographical selections by the author; contemporary perspectives on the meatpacking industry, including writings by Theodore Dreiser, Adolphe Smith, and J. Ogden Armour; and commentary on the living conditions of immigrant workers. Historical studies by Jimmy Skaggs, Rick Halpern, James Barrett, Robert M. Crunden, John Braeman, William Cronon, and Eric Schlosser address the central issues: slaughterhouse abuses, protectionism and The Beef Trust, muckraking, Progressivism, and consumer rights.

"Criticism" collects eight provocative readings of The Jungle as a literary text, as a historical document in its own right, as a contribution to Progressive-era muckraking, and as an important work in urban, economic, and labor history. Contributions include Jack London, Edward Clark Marsh, Winston Spencer Churchill, Walter Rideout, June Howard, Scott Derrick, Michael Brewster Folsom, and Christopher P. Wilson.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.

About the author (2003)

Upton Sinclair, a lifelong vigorous socialist, first became well known with a powerful muckraking novel, The Jungle, in 1906. Refused by five publishers and finally published by Sinclair himself, it became an immediate bestseller, and inspired a government investigation of the Chicago stockyards, which led to much reform. In 1967 he was invited by President Lyndon Johnson to "witness the signing of the Wholesome Meat Act, which will gradually plug loopholes left by the first Federal meat inspection law" (N.Y. Times), a law Sinclair had helped to bring about. Newspapers, colleges, schools, churches, and industries have all been the subject of a Sinclair attack, analyzing and exposing their evils. Sinclair was not really a novelist, but a fearless and indefatigable journalist-crusader. All his early books are propaganda for his social reforms. When regular publishers boycotted his work, he published himself, usually at a financial loss. His 80 or so books have been translated into 47 languages, and his sales abroad, especially in the former Soviet Union, have been enormous.

Clare Virginia Eby is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo, editor of Theodore Dreiser's The Genius, and co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser

Bibliographic information

TitleThe Jungle: An Authoritative Text, Contexts and Backgrounds, Criticism
Volume 0 of Norton critical edition
AuthorUpton Sinclair
EditorClare Virginia Eby
PublisherNorton, 2003
ISBN039397779X, 9780393977790
Length526 pages
Subjects › 

Fiction / Classics
  
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