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The Jungle is a novel that focuses on a family of immigrants who came to America looking for a better life. The novel was written by Upton Sinclair, who went into the Chicago stockyards to investigate what life was like for the people who worked there. The book was originally written with the intent of showing Socialism as a better option than Capitalism for the society. However, the details of the story ended up launching a government investigation of the meat packing plants, and ultimately regulation of food products. It gave an informative view of what life was like in America at the time. Important topics like immigration, working conditions and sanitation issues of the time were all addressed well in the novel.
Immigration was one of the heavy themes in the novel, including where immigrants came from and why they came to America, and how they were treated once they got here. The story is about a man from Lithuania, Jurgis Rudkus, who takes his family to America in hopes of attaining the American Dream. A family he knows has lost all their money to creditors in Lithuania and now have nowhere to live, but a member of the family, Jonas, talks about how a friend he knows who immigrated to America and had great success. The majority of the immigrants who came to America at this period, during the Industrial Revolution, were mainly “Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, or Bohemians” (28). Before them it was the Irish, and then before them the immigrants mostly coming to America were German (70). The reason that Jurgis decided that he would go to America is because of all the great things he had heard about it, about the ideal of being free. He had heard “In that country, rich or poor, a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he did not have to pay out his money to rascally officials—he might do as he pleased, and count himself as good as any other man” (23). This is what many immigrants believe in, and they wanted to come to the country in hopes of finding the American Dream, where they could work hard and make their way to the top of the ladder, where they would live freely in success.
However, the reality of what America was like was very harsh to most of the immigrants that flocked to it during the Industrial Revolution. For Jurgis and the eleven others he brought with on the voyage, they found that immigrants were...
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...d no idea or care that there was so many things wrong with it, because there was not healthier or better food to find within miles.
The Jungle has many strong points that tell how things were for most immigrants during this time period. Many fled to America in hopes of the talks of being free from oppression and to be able to maintain a strong job and become successful, but very few ever realized it. The sanitation and working conditions in the plants were so coarse that it literally put the country in a shock to discover what was really going on. The book was extremely influential in making an impact on the regulation of all the food industries and making sure the food sold in stores is healthy and up to certain standards. It also helped raise agendas about how terrible the conditions in the plants were, which helped strengthen the unions of the time to better fight against the robber barons of the time. Though it was aimed at helping the socialist party, it ended up being a story that changed the way many Americans thought about their country and inevitably forced them to change things for the better.
Works Cited
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Dell, 2003.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is about a Lithuanian family living in Chicago in the 1900’s. They had faith in the American dream, hoping to start a new and successful life. Unfortunately they were deprived of they hopes and dreams. They were placed in the middle of a society where only the strongest and richest survived. The rich keep getting richer and the poor get even poorer. Jurgis and his family went to extreme lengths just in hopes of finding a job, they were forced to travel in heavy rain, strong winds, and thick snow, even when they were sick, in fear of losing their jobs. The Jungle pointed out many flaws in society such as filthy meat and sickening work conditions.
While The Jungle was by far Sinclair’s most famous work, what many are not aware of is the fact that The Jungle was initially written as an expose for a well-known socialist newspaper in the country, Appeal to Reason. Although Sinclair once said he were to write the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labor movement”, he did so not by merely speculating what the meat packing industry was like, but by actually experiencing the lifestyle firsthand. Upton Sinclair went to the packing plants himself in order to truly gain the experience of what it was like to work in the stockyards as well as communicating directly with employees, laborers, social workers, and locals to truly grasp what life was like in a place like Packingtown. It was not until Sinclair was able to take all of his experiences in that he was able to sit down and write an accurate and to some, frightful expose of what the meat packing industry
Upton Sinclair’s classic The Jungle analyzes a variety of concerns varying from politics to working conditions in America's capitalist economy. Sinclair highlights key issues for the Progressive Era reform, while he uncovers significant corruption taking place with the country’s rapid industrialization. He was labeled a “muckraker” for exposing the system that privileges the powerful. Upton Sinclair states that the paramount goal for writing his book was to improve worker conditions, increase wages, and put democratic socialism as a major political party. The book shocked the public nation by uncovering the unhealthy standards in the meatpacking industry it also resulted in a congressional investigation.
Even though monopolies are illegal, public corruption allows companies to form and continues to be a problem today. In an article published by the Los Angeles, Anh Do
Sinclair’s The Jungle, is his fictionalized report of Chicago's Packingtown. It traces a family of Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago, and describes the horrifying living and working conditions they endure. Through Jurgis, the protagonist, and his family, Sinclair unfolds the tragedy of suffering of all Packinghouse workers in their pursuit of the American Dream. He gives a detailed description about their ordeals, from their lodging at boardinghouses to their buying of cheated house,...
In the years from 1860 through 1890, the prospect of a better life attracted nearly ten million immigrants who settled in cities around the United States. The growing number of industries produced demands for thousands of new workers and immigrants were seeking more economic opportunities. Most immigrants settled near each other’s own nationality and/or original village when in America.
“I aimed for the public’s heart, and by accident I hit them in the stomach” (Sinclair). Upton Sinclair uses these words to describe the reaction his novel, The Jungle, receives upon first publication. Sinclair’s original purpose of The Jungle intends to illustrate the difficult challenges of immigrants in Chicago at the turn of the century; giving details and samples of abuses in the Chicago meatpacking industry to highlight their troubles. Instead, the public demands government intervention against the atrocities and this public outcry leads to the 1906 Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Elements of Naturalism exist throughout most of the text. Naturalism attempts to apply scientific ideals and division when studying the human race. In Upton Sinclair’s brutally descriptive novel, The Jungle, the literary elements of character, setting, and theme show three areas where the book illustrates naturalistic fictional trends.
“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 new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe experienced a great deal of prejudice simply because they were different. The earlier settlers also felt resentment because they thought that the new immigrants were taking away all of the jobs. There were also fears that the poverty of the new immigrants would cause most of them to turn to crime. Many people at the time argued that the new immigrants “threatened to overwhelm American culture” (Anderson
In Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, “The Jungle,” he exposes corruption in business and government and its disastrous effects on a family from Lithuania. The novel follows immigrant Jurgis Rudkus as he struggles against the slow ANNIHILATION of his family and is REBORN after discovering that socialism as a cure away to all capitalism’s problems. The Jungle is an example of protest literature because it exposes in a muckraking style the DANGEROUS, INHUMAINE conditions that workers lived and worked in, corruption in business and politics and the unsanitary meat that was sold.
...n the trying time of the Great Migration. Students in particular can study this story and employ its principles to their other courses. Traditional character analysis would prove ineffective with this non-fiction because the people in this book are real; they are our ancestors. Isabel Wilkerson utilized varied scopes and extensive amounts of research to communicate a sense of reality that lifted the characters off the page. While she concentrated on three specifically, each of them served as an example of someone who left the south during different decades and with different inspirations. This unintentional mass migration has drastically changed and significantly improved society, our mindset, and our economics. This profound and influential book reveals history in addition to propelling the reader into a world that was once very different than the one we know today.
Immigrants during this time period came to America seeking wealth for their family they had brought with them, or to send back to their families in their homeland. Whichever case it was immigrants spent the majority of their time working in the factories in hope for a better life than the one they gave up in coming to America. However, upon arriving immigrants soon realized that the home they left behind was not all that different than their new one. Immigrants came seeking the types of jobs that would give them Liberty and independence, leaving them only to find themselves just a working part in a large factory dependent on machines, rather than their own skills.
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.
Ernest Hemingway's "Indian Camp" is a story in which a man looks back upon a very influential event in his childhood. The story tells of a young boy named Nick, who watches as his father aids in the birth of a young Indian child. The circumstances that arrive during this event shape the "older Nick's" perception of his father, as well as life and mortality.
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