Political Novels of The Jungle and Johnny Got His Gun

Political Novels of The Jungle and Johnny Got His Gun

Introduction:

Although writing has been around for thousands of years, the medium of books is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the mid 15th century, German Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press that made multiple, cheap copies of works that were easily available for the masses. With the help of other technological developments including the linotype in the mid-1880’s, the printing process became easier and faster and therefore books became cheaper and more available. Also in the mid-1880’s the development of public education increased the demand for books making them even more popular and ensuring them as a permanent form of media for the masses.

But most books over history remained focused on religion or non-fiction. But with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740, the novel was born. The novel differs from pure non-fiction as the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines the novel as “an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events.” Novels over the years have moved people personally, but political novels especially, incite mass movements including the famous example of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose book’s impact was so great that Abraham Lincoln famously told her at the start of the Civil War, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War!”

For this paper, I chose to read and examine Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. Written in the height of the muckraking era, The Jungle exposes the terrible conditions of the meatpacking industry and influenced the American public...

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Trumbo, Dalton. Johnny Got His Gun. New York: Bantam Books, 1970.