The Jungle

This book was fact. Upton Sinclair visited Chicago in November 1904 to do research for the book. Sinclair lived in a neighborhood called

Packingtown for seven weeks. While in Packingtown, Sinclair interviewed workers, lawyers, doctors, saloonkeepers, and social workers.

The book deals with the greed and ruthless competition that turned

America into a brutal country, which Sinclair referred to as a "jungle."

The Jungle also tells how those at the bottom of the economic ladder, who were wage-earners and their families, are at a great disadvantage in the capitalist country. The wage-earners are slaves to the sudden wishes of their masters, who are the capitalists who own and run private industries. The Jungle starts with the marriage of Ona Lukoszaite and Jurgis

Rudkus in America, which was organized by Ona's cousin Marija. The novel then flashes back to their lives in a rural Lithuanian town, and how their families, Ona's stepmother Elzbieta, and her five children,

Jurgis' father, and four other adults, thought that America would be such a great place to live in and decided to move to America. The day after the wedding is over, everyone was back to work and Jurgis and Ona's married life was cheerless. The pressures of work, poverty and illness stifles the families spirits and then Dede Antanas, Jurgis' dad, dies.

After Jurgis gives his father an inexpensive funeral, he decides to join the Union and begins to learn English and gets an unfriendly opinion of democracy. Jurgis begins to see how the packers operate, they sell spoiled or contaminated meat without remorse. Workers are exposed to awful occupational diseases without protection. Then, Ona give's birth to a baby boy. The families third winter in America starts with Jurgis getting injured on the job and Jonas, Elzbieta's brother, disappearing, leaving the families income to decrease by one third. When Jurgis recovers and goes to get his job back, he finds it gone and must find another job. He finds a job at Durham's Fertilizer Plant. Because of the smell of the plant, Jurgis starts to drink. He then finds out that Ona is pregnant again, and he isn't the father. Ona's boss, Phil Connor, threatened to fire everyone in her family if she did not submit herself to him. Jurgis nearly kills Connor when he finds out and is sent to jail.

When Jurgis is let out of jail, he finds his family evicted from the house they tried so hard to keep, and back to the lodging house where the family was when they first arrived. Upon finding the family, Ona is giving birth, and Jurgis persuades a midwife to help, to no benefit, and