Upton Sinclair was an American writer whose works reflects not only the inside but also the socialists view on things. Upton sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He was born into a family which held to it’s Southern aristocracy in every thing that was done. When Sinclair was ten years old, the family packed up and moved to New York City ( Where there were more opportunities to succeed ).
Upton Beall Sinclair began writing when he was 15 years old. He mostly wrote ethnic jokes and fiction for a fun magazine. He wrote these silly stories and jokes in order for the magazine to pay for his studies at New York City College. After he was done at New York City College, in 1897, he enrolled at Columbia University. By this time, Upton was putting out many novels and respected works. He was already being realized as one of the greatest writers of his time. Upton was putting out up to two novels per week. This was unheard of at this point in time. During these years he wrote Clif Faraday stories such as "Ensign Clarke Fitch." He was also writing Mark Mallory Stories like "Lieutenant Frederick Garrison" for boys’ weekly magazine.
His writing was on the right track, but he still didn’t have that one book to put him over the top. In 1900 Sinclair married his first wife. This was a start of a whole new era of writing for him. By 1904 Sinclair was moving toward a realistic fiction type of writing. He had become a regular reader of the "Appeal to Reason", which was a popular socialist-populist weekly magazine at that time. Upton’s big break came in 1906 when he published a book called, " The Jungle." As a writer this is where Sinclair gained most of his fame. This book gave him not only fame, but it also led to the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. This book had the deepest impact since Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The books popularity enabled Sinclair to establish and support the socialistic Helicon Home Colony in Englewood, N.J. However the popularity of his type of writing fell away after that year. After " The Jungle" was written it set off many similar studies of a group, and industry. or a region. Among some of them were: "The Metropolis" (1908) which was a exploration of New York people, "King Coal" (1917) which was a story about the Colorado Mining strike of 1914, and "Oil!" which was considered one of Sinclair’s most influential writings.
Nehemi Winn Mary Hill American Studies 12 April 2016 The Jungle and The Progressive Era During the early 1900s, the changing views on human rights redefined the standards of society and government in America. When Upton Sinclair published his novel The Jungle, it immediately affected American society and American federal policy, although Sinclair had hoped to bring about a different reaction.
Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland on September 20th 1978. Sinclair grew up in a broken household; his father was an alcohol salesman and killed himself drinking. While his mother would not even think about drinking alcohol. So these personalities naturally clashed. So Sinclair found some solace in books, Sinclair was a natural writer and he began publishing at the young age of fifteen years old. Sinclair started off going to school at a small college by the name of New York City College. This was just temporary as Sinclair would need time and money to move higher up to a form of better education. So as a result Sinclair took the initiative and he started writing columns on ethnic jokes and hack fiction for small magazines in New York. The money he earned writing these columns allowed him to completely pay for New York City College, and eventually enroll to attend Columbia University. Sinclair worked as hard as he possibly could to get into Columbia University and he was going to do the absolute best he could while he was attending the University. Since Sinclair needed ex...
The novel follows a family of immigrants from Lithuania working in a meatpacking factory, and as the novel progresses, the reader learns of the revolting conditions within the factories. Sinclair’s The Jungle illustrates the concept of Bitzer’s “Rhetorical Situation” and Emerson’s quote quite effectively. For instance, the horrendous safety and health conditions of the packing factories were the exigencies that Upton Sinclair was making clear to the reader. The rhetorical audience that Sinclair aimed to influence with his novel was Congress and the president, as both had to agree in order to establish health and safety bills to better the conditions within factories. Sinclair’s efforts did not go unnoticed as in 1906 both the Meat Inspection Act, and the Pure Food and Drug act were approved by both Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt (Cherny,
However, that was not the case. When The Jungle was presented to the public, readers were astonished by the disgusting and unsanitary state in which the meat was being processed in. The community was more concerned with the meat conditions than they were with the horrific conditions the workers were faced with. So while the popularity of Sinclair’s work was not his original intentions, it still accomplished stages of reform. It can be assumed that Roosevelts initial reluctance to accept Sinclair’s novel was in part, directly connected to his disbelief that the Federal government had become so disconnected and oblivious to American industry and the complete lack of Federal oversight. This “disconnect” did not last long as The Pure Food and Drug Act, as well as, the Meat Inspection Act were both directly set in to place mere months after Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle was published. This type of reform supported progressive philosophy by preventing corporate owners from remaining above government regulation and started a trend in the way government regulators began to deal with corporate monopolies and trusts. The Jungle, along with other “muckrakers” began a series of Federal oversight reforms and regulatory guidance that soon began to take hold in other industries. Big industry would soon realize that they were not above the
The Jungle, the 1906 exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry. The novel focuses on an immigrant family and sympathetically and realistically describes their struggles with loan sharks and others who take advantage of their innocence. More importantly, Sinclair graphically describes the brutal working conditions of those who find work in the stockyards. Sinclair's description of the main character's
At the beginnings of the 1900s, some leading magazines in the U.S have already started to exhibit choking reports about unjust monopolistic practices, rampant political corruption, and many other offenses; which helped their sales to soar. In this context, in 1904, The Appeal to Reason, a leading socialist weekly, offered Sinclair $500 to prepare an exposé on the meatpacking industry (Cherny). To accomplish his mission, Sinclair headed to Chicago, the center of the meatpacking industry, and started an investigation as he declared“ I spent seven weeks in Packingtown studying conditions there, and I verified every smallest detail, so that as a picture of social conditions the book is as exact as a government report” (Sinclair, The Industrial Republic 115-16). To get a direct knowledge of the work, he sneaked into the packing plants as a pretended worker. He toured the streets of Packingtown, the area near the stockyards where the workers live. He approached people, from different walks of life, who could provide useful information about conditions in Packingtown. At the end of seven weeks, he returned home to New Jersey, shut himself up in a small cabin, wrote for nine months, and produced The Jungle (Cherny).
From respectable authorities on the subject, and the 1906 Food and Drugs Act itself, gave paticual understanding of the events effecting that time period, a understanding of certain points in the novel “The Jungle”, and how the government went about solving the nation’s going problem, has lead myself to agree that Upton Sinclairs’s
In 1906, socialist Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a book he hoped would awaken the American people to the deplorable conditions of workers in the meat packing industry. Instead, the book sent the country reeling with its description of filthy, rat infested plants, suspect meats processed and sold to consumers, and corrupt government inspectors. President Roosevelt became seriously concerned by the charges brought forth by Mr. Sinclair and determined the only way to protect consumers from unscrupulous business and unsafe food was to enforce regulation.
“The Jungle” novel was written by an American journalist/ novelist name Upton Sinclair in 1906. “The Jungle” made a big hit and became his best-selling novel because it revealed so well about the economical and social reality during that time. The book mainly described about how unsanitary the meat packing industry was operated in Chicago and the miserable life of the immigrants going along with the industry. Through the story around the life and family of Jurgis Rudjus, a Lithuanian immigrant who comes to America with the belief to change their life and live in a better condition, Sinclair expresses that “The Jungle” is a symbol of capitalism. Sinclair’s contempt for capitalist society is present throughout the novel, demonstrated in the eagerness of Jurgis to work, the constant struggle for survival of the workers in Packing town and the corruption of the man at all levels of the society. Also, the author promotes socialism as a standard political society to replace capitalism.
The book, The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, has portrayed how conditions and social norms of the early 1900’s helped shape society through social reform. Sexism, racism, and class, shaped the experiences and choices of the immigrants in The Jungle throughout the book. The huge difference between the classes was the most significant of the three. Sinclair used the story of one immigrant and his family to help show what was going on in society at that time, to raise awareness, and to promote socialism.
Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, wrote this novel to unveil the atrocious working conditions and the contaminated meat in meat-packing workhouses. It was pathos that enabled his book to horrify hundreds of people and to encourage them to take a stand against these meat-packing companies. To obtain the awareness of people, he incorporated a descriptive style to his writing. Ample amounts of imagery, including active verbs, abstract and tangible nouns, and precise adjectives compelled readers to be appalled. Durham, the leading Chicago meat packer, was illustrated, “having piles of meat... handfuls of dried dung of rats...rivers of hot blood, and carloads of moist flesh, and soap caldrons, craters of hell.” ( Sinclair 139). His description
Taking place in the jungle of meat packing factories during the early 1900s in Chicago, a journalist by the name of Upton Sinclair dissects the savage inner workings of America’s working class factory lifestyle. Sinclair portrayed the grim circumstance that workers faced and the exploited lives of factory workers in Chicago. He became what was then called a mudrucker; a journalist who goes undercover to see first hand the conditions they were investigating. Being in poor fortune, Sinclair was able to blend into the surrounds of the factory life with his poor grimy clothing. The undercover journalist would walk into the factory with the rest of the men, examine its conditions, and record them when he returned home. It is the worker’s conditions
Capitalism underwent a severe attack at the hands of Upton Sinclair in this novel. By showing the misery that capitalism brought the immigrants through working conditions, living conditions, social conditions, and the overall impossibility to thrive in this new world, Sinclair opened the door for what he believed was the solution: socialism. With the details of the meatpacking industry, the government investigated and the public cried out in disgust and anger. The novel was responsible for the passage of The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. With the impact that Sinclair must have known this book would have, it is interesting that he also apparently tried to make it fuction as propaganda against capitalism and pro-socialism.
In the early 1900's life for America's new Chicago immigrant workers in the meat packing industry was explored by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle. Originally published in 1904 as a serial piece in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, Sinclair's novel was initially found too graphic and shocking by publishing firms and therefore was not published in its complete form until 1906. In this paper, I will focus on the challenges faced by a newly immigrated worker and on what I feel Sinclair's purpose was for this novel.
The Jungle. One of the most famous muckrakers, Upton Sinclair, published The Jungle in 1906, and it immediately became an international best-seller. Sinclair, who had joined the Socialist party in 1903 originally wrote The Jungle for the socialist magazine, The Appeal to Reason (Constitutional Rights Foundation). He spent time in the Chicago meatpacking district so he could truly see what was going on. What Sinclair witnessed was appalling. He saw sausage that had traveled to and from Europe, poisoned bread and dead rats being put in the hopper that ground the sausage. Instead of smoking the sausage, they preserved the meat with borax and used gelatin to color it (Sinclair 168-169). Although Sinclair wrote The Jungle to show his readers the evils of capitalism, people were more appalled at the disgusting and unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking industry.