Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then President Theodore Roosevelt, and was a major catalyst to the passing of the Pure Food and Meat Inspection act, which has tremendous impact to this day. Penguin Enriched eBook Classics Features:
• How to Navigate Guide
• Upton Sinclair Chronology
• Filmography and 1914 The Jungle Film Poster
• Early Twentieth-Century Reviews of The Jungle
• Upton Sinclair's Letter to the Editor of The New York Times
• Suggested Further Reading
• The Jungle and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906
• The Jungle Book Cover Designs
• Federal Food and Drugs Act of 1906
• Immigrants and the Meatpacking Industry, Then and Now
• Images of the Chicago Stockyards
• Images of Cuts of Beef and Pork
• Enriched eBook Notes
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was born in Baltimore. At age fifteen, he began writing a series of dime novels in order to pay for his education at the City College of New York. He was later accepted to do graduate work at Columbia, and while there he published a number of novels, including The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903) and Manassas (1904).
Sinclair’s breakthrough came in 1906 with the publication of The Jungle, a scathing indictment of the Chicago meat-packing industry. His later works include World’s End (1940), Dragon’s Teeth (1942), which won him a Pulitzer Prize, O Shepherd, Speak! (1949) and Another Pamela (1950).
Eric Schlosser has been a correspondent for The Atlantic since 1996. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He has received a National Magazine Award and a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for reporting. His groundbreaking book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal was published in 2001. His second book Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market followed in 2003.
Ronald Gottesman was born in Boston and earned degrees from the University of Massachusetts and from Colgate and Indiana universities. He has taught literature, film studies, and humanities courses at Northwestern, Indiana, and Rutgers universities, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Southern California, where for nine years he directed the Center for the Humanities. Founding editor of the Quarterly Review of Film Studies and Humanities in Society, Professor Gottesman is editor and author of many articles and books on literature and film, including three on Upton Sinclair. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in psychoanalysis.
Jonathan Beecher Field is an assistant professor of English at Clemson University. He received a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Chicago in 2004. His first book, Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London, is being published by University Press of New England in 2009. He writes about food and culture at thegurglingcod.com.
