The Jungle tells the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in Chicago’s meatpacking district determined to live out the American dream. (The book differs in many respects from the newspaper serial.) To this day, The Jungle has never been out of print. rescued it from obscurity, publishing The Jungle in book form. Meanwhile, several publishers, including one that had given Sinclair a second $500 advance, turned it down. Appeal to Reason never printed the ending, however, due to tepid reader response. Having made a favorable impression, he then received $500 to research and write The Jungle, which ran in installments from February to November 1905. Discovering socialism, Sinclair said, “was like the falling down of prison walls about my mind.” In September 1904, he penned his first article for Appeal to Reason, the largest-circulation socialist newspaper in the United States. Sinclair embraced socialism wholeheartedly within months of being introduced to it, and, except for a brief interlude during World War I, he would remain a committed member of the Socialist Party of America for decades thereafter. The Jungle initially appeared in a socialist newspaper. At one point, he also stumbled upon a laborer’s wedding party, which served as the inspiration for his opening chapter. For The Jungle, a 26-year-old Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago, touring stockyards and slaughterhouses and interviewing the laborers there, along with priests, bartenders, policemen, politicians and social workers. Yet he reported his books much like a journalist. Unlike most other muckrakers, such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens, Sinclair mainly wrote fiction. Sinclair is arguably the best known of the so-called muckrakers, the forerunners of today’s investigative journalists who in the early 1900s exposed widespread corporate and political malfeasance.
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), American novelist, circa 1915.
0 kommentar(er)
